Yesterday's post was about last weekend, so today's will be about yesterday :-)
Yesterday I tried out a new workout that I've been wanting to do for some time and I think the time is finally right.
Many of you know that my major goal is to complete a 40K time trial (24.8 miles) in less than an hour. I'm not picky: 59:59 is a good enough time for me.
My training all winter has been focused on that goal and I've made tremendous improvements along the way. Most of those workouts have used intervals from 5 to 20 minutes in length with decent recovery between them. A 5-minute interval might have 5 minutes of recovery before the next one. A 20 minute interval usually had 10 minutes.
Yesterday's trainer workout was about incomplete recovery. The goal was to accumulate 60 minutes of racing intensity by spending 5 minutes at race pace (103% of FTP, 275 watts was my goal) and then 1 minute at an easy soft-pedaling pace (around 130 watts). That means 12 repetitions of 5 minutes to each 60 minutes.
On paper, it's simple. In reality, it's a lot harder.
Probably the hardest part was remembering to keep the pace down in the beginning. The first few intervals were not that hard. I had to keep reminding myself that I was going to be doing a lot of them. Sure enough, the later ones were MUCH harder to keep the pace.
Second was keeping track. It's pretty hard to remember how many intervals you've done when you are having to consciously focus on your breathing and pacing. I have a large pile of safety pins from all the races that I have done over the years and I set them on the stand next to my trainer. At the end of each interval, I moved on pin to the other side of the stand.
Me being me, I gradually set them in 4 rows of 3, so I could tell how many intervals I had done at any time with a glance.
In the end, the hard work and focus paid off: my average power for the entire collected group was 276 watts. My first interval was the lowest at 270 (I was probably not warmed up enough) and my highest was 282. Most of them were 275 or 277.
It's not a workout I will do all the time, but I definitely think it has a place in the workout library. I'm thinking that next time I will either increase the target intensity slightly or change the work/rest ratio (maybe 6 minutes on, 1 minute off).
