What workout did you do today? (2018/2019)

Long run today. First half of my custom build is almost done. A nice recovery week starts tomorrow.

I think I need to try and keep my focus up for my cadence… I should be shooting for 180, but I think when I start out at a nice and casual pace, that I naturally slow down my cadence, otherwise you feel like you’re running in place.

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Managed Carpathian Peak on Thursday, felt like a really hard effort. Had to travel on Friday, 8 hours in driving so did a short ride outside yesterday and then Mount Goode today. Really suffered in the second interval but completed it, had to dial down the third interval. Perhaps the 16,000 steps walking the dog before it not help !

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Sunday is supposed to be an outdoor MTB ride, but all our rain is getting in the way of that. Decided to do a 1hr version of Hunter.

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The numbers don’t necessarily show it, but this one took more focus than normal after doing Spanish needle yesterday.

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Having a really difficult time finishing out the last two weeks of this build block. Not sure if this is by design of my fitness is slipping (I did had a 4 day ski trip a few weeks back and volume generally down slightly vs dec/jan).

I did North Pack today and dropped the target on the last effort as a mental bargain with myself to finish efforts 2 and 3 at target power.

At the end of the day, this did still represent my all time best hour of power but its messing with my head that it felt so hard when I’ve successfully done sessions like Carpathian Peak about a month ago at perhaps less perceived exertion

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Home Brew Monday :grin:

Note to self - ensure that your bike is correctly fixed to the trainer! Eight minutes in and it nearly went very, very wrong.

Felt pleased with this, especially after the kicking I took in the crit on Saturday.

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Weekends workouts…


struggled Saturday, maybe a fuelling thing, knew by middle of second interval I was in for a hard one, so cut short third and dialled back fourth and fifth and completed. no great concern, just one of those days.

Sundays was better, had to restart zwift part way through and ended up with a paired power source, but resolved before 4th interval. Low cadence grind for last two but got through it… rest day today whoop whoop

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OK so a week later, I decided that Bluebell wasn’t going to cut it, so looked for something with similar overall duration but with longer work and/or less recovery intervals

Decided to do Baird +2. First set seemed OK and again didn’t really feel like I was blowing at the end, so I increased the intensity for the remaining work by 5%.

Got through it in the end, partially motivated by the fear of having to come on here afterwards and report being bested by my own hubris.

Definitely felt more how I imagined a VO2max workout should feel.

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Much needed rest today, but crushed Antelope yesterday and followed it with a 15min brick run. I’m really proud of this workout. It felt like a turning point. Last time I did this 12 weeks ago I averaged 147 power and 140 heart rate with 84 cadence. Huge improvements all around. I’ve eaten really clean the last few weeks and it seems to really be paying off.

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Started very easy, but not feeling good after 1h30. Took a break, ate some food and took it up to 2h40 but I was just not feeling good.

I’m hoping it’s just poor fuelling - I burned around 1600kcal but only ate around 1000kcal before and during the ride - but family has been sick around me for weeks so could be the start of a decline :grimacing:

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Did Raymond +7 last night. This buried me. First interval was fine. Super hard, but I was able to hang on fine. Second interval felt about as hard at 4 minutes as the first one did at 8. Tried to vary it up by standing for 20 seconds at a time, which seemed to help. Did that a couple times, and then took a 15 second backpedal. That helped a bunch. Finished the interval completely crushed.

Took some extra rest just sitting on the bike. I was scheduled for a 5 minute spin, and took an extra 5 minutes of just sitting there. I had felt pretty motivated, was going to just rest up extra, and give it another go. And then I just couldn’t recover. Did the extra rest, pedaled for a few minutes. Was still completely gassed. Took another break, during the recovery interval. Just sat there trying to recover, not quite sure how long. Finished the last few minutes of the recovery interval, and noped out of trying to get another interval in.

Spent a bit of time loitering in the workout room before jumping into a shower. And then went down to get a snack, and realized that even after all that time recovering, I STILL felt smashed. On one hand, I was bummed that I wasn’t able to push through it. On the other, if I was that fatigued from the efforts I did, may not have been the worst thing to call it early.

I took an extra (unplanned) day off before the ride, and was plenty rested and fueled up for this. I thought I had all my boxes checked, but got destroyed anyway.

HR for my 1st interval hit about 95% HRmax at about 6.5 minutes in, and the same during the 2nd at 3.5 minutes in. Both intervals seemed to get about up that high, but no higher.

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shoveled snow for an hour lol (13 inches)

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Kaweah -1 on Saturday and Geiger +2 on Sunday. :astonished:

Kaweah was on the calendar for Saturday but I opted for the -1 version since I took on Colosseum -2 on Friday as an unplanned workout and didn’t want to bite off more than I could chew with Kaweah.

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Warmup (LSCT Warmup, 20 mins), then Ramp Test to kick off SSBLV2. Mixed bag - easy week ending SSBLV1 was a week ago, was traveling all of last week (only managed to do a 45min run somewhere in there), so 9 days off the bike, and an easy week before that… good training so far helped, being more familiar with the ramp test helped, but that long off period did not - all in all a 2% increase in FTP nonetheless.

My mental approach to the ramp test: anything above 19:30 increases the FTP estimate, 5 minutes of warmup, so I need to complete 15 steps or more. The only thing my brain is allowed to do during the test is count how many steps are remaining until the 15 are done. You can talk to me about stopping once that’s done.

Needless to say, I ended at 20 minutes on the dot.

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@arusoff maybe it’s the length of the workout too? North Pack is 2 hours with work until the very end and the recoveries aren’t true recoveries. Carpathian Peak is really only 36 minutes of threshold with nice, true recoveries between each interval. Don’t get down on yourself, especially since you set an all time best hour power! That probably means it should be one of your hardest workouts :grinning:

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Weather was nice but with a ‘yellow’ wind warning (winds of 30mph with gusts to 45-60mph). It was calm when I ventured out onto the trails on the gravel bike for some hill repeats 1’ hard (all-out, really), 1’ easy with the goal of x15. For variety, I worked three different hills. The second had a less steep, nearly a false flat, section in the middle, which burned more than the climb. The calm broke at the 11th as the wind picked up mightily and I was bombarded by pine cones, all near misses, accompanied by small branches. It was a mercy as I was fried. Still, it was nice to be outside.

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Not sure that lower cadence equals lower heart rate. I’m sure this has been a topic on the forum and I’m sure there are arguments on both sides including recent studies that suggest lower cadences can be more efficient, but then the anecdotal evidence and my own personal opinion that those studies miss “something” about higher cadences that make them easier to hold for some/many/most?. Again, it’s a personal thing, but in my journey to raise my cadence I did not not see a correlating heart rate increase. I had at one time feared a “perceived” effort increase at first but I don’t think that was real. I would think 65 would be tough on the knees, but I suppose you would know that if it were by now.

Threw Wright Peak +2 on the calendar for this past weekend and completed it without too much pain. I remember doing SS intervals at a lower FTP in September wondering how the hell anyone could complete Wright Peak, let alone Wright Peak +2.

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I’m not convinced that’s the case either. To be clear, I’m neither defending nor espousing the lower cadence route. I’m exploring it under the premise we’re not running 138mi (112mi bike in a ‘running position’ + marathon… as in we’re told the tri position is to use our legs like runners, or at least that’s what I heard at the turn of the century in my first tri career) but cycling and then running.

Is this Jan Ulrich v Lance Armstrong? If you need to lift 100 lbs, would you prefer to do it in one go, or lift 50 lbs twice, or 25 lbs four times, or 10 lbs ten times? That’s what I used to explain to runners when I coached for higher cadence running, but that’s a weight-bearing activity, but are / aren’t the same principles applicable to the bike? Am I now arguing against myself?

On the knees, no hint of stress. Don’t know if that’s from ultramarathons (3 of 8 events last year were ultras, and 4 of 5 the year before) that are often time on feet slogfests or what.

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Pre-ramp test prep for me today. Extremely late though but had to put the kids to sleep before the workout. Tomorrow is going to be tough as always…

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