With no race and a three-day weekend, my coach decided to have me do something a little radical this weekend.
I've
mentioned that my foundation training was not what I had hoped for and
that I've been seeing a drop in many indicators of fitness throughout
the spring racing season. The common ingredient there is a lack of
aerobic fitness.
His goal was to completely tax my aerobic energy systems beyond anything I've ever experienced trying to build them back up.
Saturday
was the longest day I've ever spent on the bike, both in terms of time
and in distance: 103 miles in 5 hours, 20 minutes. It was not just
several hours at a steady pace. I did two intervals of an hour each at a
high tempo pace. I did 6 one-minute sprints uphill. And I did 3
five-minute VO2 efforts. By the end, I was totally cooked.
Sunday
was another pretty long day: 3 hours, 40 minutes and 65 miles. It was
at an easy pace with no major efforts. It was just a long endurace ride.
Monday
(today) was back to the higher intensity. It was a two hour ride with 4
threshold intervals of 10 minutes each. With the focused intervals,
Monday is on the trainer, even though it's a nice day out. To be honest,
it took all I had to do these. I was so tired and my legs were so sore,
I just wanted to take the day off and lay around. But I dug in and did
it... and now I'm glad it's over!
It was a grand total
of 11 hours of riding in 3 days. I average 11 hours on a good WEEK of
training. Doing that much in 3 days really pushed me to my limits. It
also gave new meaning to the expression "long weekend".
Whether this weekend's plan turns out to be insanity or brilliance remains to be seen :-)
