Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

So, here's an update on my training rides from Monday and Tuesday.

Monday's ride stunk. I'm not sure exactly why it stuck but it did. Maybe I didn't eat well enough that day, maybe my legs were blocked from the recovery week or maybe I just felt bad but whatever the reason I did OK for about the first 35 minutes and then just sort of faded away. I was able to hold the 325 pace only in the first hill interval and then everything after that was downhill, so to speak. When I looked at my power data (I'm becoming a data geek) I lost about 20 watts in each interval at the same basic heart rate. What was worse is how bad I felt through the whole hill repeats part of the workout. I managed to do two sets of jump intervals and actually felt OK for those. It was a disappointing day to say the least.

Tuesday morning's ride, fortunately, went a whole lot better. I did 4 fifteen minute intervals with five minutes of recovery between each on the TT bike. The first interval was in an easier gear with a higher cadence and then I dropped the cadence and increased the gear on each successive interval. Intervals 1 and 3 were steady state and I averaged right at 300 watts for each which was good. Interval 2 was an over under interval where I would spend a minute at 275 watts and then a minute at 335 watts. Interval 4 was the same thing but at 250 and 300 watts. I finished off with some one legged pedaling drills. The whole ride felt a zillion times better and I have a feeling that Monday was an isolated thing.

Today's ride will be rollers/hill intervals again but out on the road this time. The weather's supposed to be great so I'm going to do a ride out to a place where I know that there are some good short climbs (we don't have anything really long around here). I'll add jumps at a variety of different road markers (county line signs, city limit signs, etc.) where I'll go off with everything for 20 seconds and then back down to hard tempo for 40 more. The idea is to begin developing the power needed to get away from a group and then hold that. Over the next couple of weeks I'll move to 30/30 and then 1 minute hard and 1 minute tempo.

Today will be the first time I take the PowerTap out on the actually open road for a hard training ride. Up until now I've either done recovery rides on the road or the two hard rides on the trainer. I'll be interested to see how well I'll be able to look at the data to determine anything. Things on the trainer I easy because every thing's controlled. On the road, the hill is as long as it is and not necessarily as long as I'd like it to be. However steep the hills is is however steep the hill is. I can change my pace to meet the power output level I'd like but I wonder how well that'll happen.

Anyways, the weather's going to be perfect (lower 70's, no wind) so I'll see you out on the road.

Thanks for Reading.

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