Hey guys,
the past year I almost trained the full year for the 2023/24 cx season. Feel free to look at my calendar and all my data. I´m not professional but I´m very ambitious. It was my first complete cx season so to say. In my region (Germany around Frankfurt) there is a Crosscup that consists of 6 races in total from the End of october to end of january.
The season before i only did once cross race which was so much fun and motivated myself to to the full cup in 23/24.
So I started training with Trainerroad and used Plan builder to plan almost a complete year full of training with my A race on 7th January which was the fifth round of the cup.
All in all I was happy with my efforts and my results. I had my best race and felt my fittest at the 10th of december. I think there was some kind of peak perfomance after some holidays in summer around september (especially on september 3rd I recreated my ride as TR workout and it gave a 8.5 Vo2max workout).
Looking at all my numbers from this year I improved my FTP from a 292 to 308. My 15sec, 30sec, 1min, 3min, 5min and 12min power numbers were lower than the year before.
At the beginning of this years cross racing I felt like I was missing some kind of punch or snappiness.
Is there anything I should have done different? Of course there were a few days of sickness at the end of the year but nothing major. (I also marked them in the calendar)
Now I want to plan my whole year in regards to next season. I first thought of doing a base period until summer with building blocks afterwards until 1 month before the start of the cx season and then do specialty phase for the rest. But I´m very sure this does not make any sense.
My next thought was using plan builder and plan the first part of this year until september with rolling road race as focus. Then do another plan builder from september until end of january 2025 with cx as focus.
This would result in Base / Build / speciality phase rolling climbs road race. I don´t think a specialty phase in summer is something I would need because I don´t do racing in summer and I could do another build in the meantime.
Last year as I planned the whole year with plan builder for CX and I gave me a specialty phase in summer - does this really make sense? Wouldn´t it make sense to even build more or get more base during the year and only go into specialty during the cx period?
What is your take on this? During summer I ride my CX bike with road tires on the road and sometimes on gravel with gravel tires. No CX in summer 
Thanks so much for your help!