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Decided to work on improving power with some jumps and anaerobic work last night.

It was tiring.

Thursday, 3/13/2008

2 x 30' @ Easy pace on commuter

The meat of the workout was on the trainer:

I knew the anaerobic work was going to be hard on the legs so I did a thorough Warmup:

1 x 10' @ Recovery pace (HR < 140)
1 x 10' @ Endurance pace (140 < HR < 153)
1 x 5' @ Tempo (154 < HR < 163)
1 x 5' @ Recovery Pace

Then:

3 x 5 "Jumps" on 75" intervals, with 5' recovery between sets.

Basically a "jump" consisted of me riding in such a gear that I was pretty much hitting my maximal capacity for output at a high cadence by the end of the set. I used 2 gearings: Probably something like 50:15 and 50:17, but I didn't bother to check. One I got higher cadence, one I used more strength. I alternated the two between jumps. One jump consisted of 12 revolutions (counting one leg for 12 revolutions) at max effort. Each one took ~10 seconds, and I took the remaining 65" of the interval for recovery.

After the jumps, I wanted to do

3 x 3' @ >Lactate Threshold. It was tough to gauge exactly where "threshold" was without a power measurement (I had to send the Computer back for replacement) so I tried to feel it out. The goal was to get the HR to ~180 - 181 by the end of each interval. Heart rate always lags a bit, so when doing tough sets it isn't as good of an indicator for where you should start. The idea of a proper interval would be that you've been kicking out superthreshold output consistently over the entire interval such that when you are done, your HR is stabilized where you want it to be.

When I use just an HR monitor, I'm sure that I go way to hard at the beginning (trying to get my HR to the right zone) and then taper off at the end because I'm cooked.

Ah well. You use the tools available, I guess.

I made it through one successfully and then cracked at 2' on the second.

Looks like I need to do more of these with a little better control on the front end.