Monday – I was carrying a lot of training load into the new week so I took it easy today. For a change of pace I rode the track bike configured for pursuit/time trailing for 30 minutes. Nothing like a recovery ride at a 20 mph pace. I really like the setup and am thinking of running it this year for flat TTs.
Tuesday – Remember those 3 minute VO2 intervals I did last week, the ones where the rest period was dictated by when my heart rate returned back to 65% of max HR? I figured today I’d bump those up to 4 minutes on the PCs. The first one was right at 115% of my threshold. Time for the rest. I stopped pedaling completely and my HR dropped like a rock. My total rest was a whopping 50 seconds before the second interval. Despite the short rest I still hit 115% of my threshold on the second interval. The next rest was just as short and the third interval was just a few watts lower. By interval #4 I had enough. These short rests were killing me and I lost my motivation. I headed home and had a short, but intense 63 minute workout (IF=0.88) on the PCs in the morning.
I was feeling guilty about the workout so later in the day I went out again for a quick tempo effort of 62 minutes.
Wednesday – No motivation to ride so I didn’t.
Thursday – Celebrated the new year with a small group of pals on our usual Saturday route. I took the bike with the Powercranks and rode the ride in a similar manner as the usual hammerfest. Bottom line was a 3:07 long ride at an overall intensity factor of 0.88. I was blitzed. 242 W normalized and 215 W average for the effort, which are my PC bests.
Friday – Expecting rain on Saturday, so a 93 minute tempo ride at IF=0.84 on the PCs was in order to keep the chronic training load increasing. I was tired from Thursday but I kept pounding harder to stress myself more. A nice negative training stress balance going into the weekend.
Saturday – No rain so the ride was on. My legs were dead from the 3 days of hard efforts this week. The first half was decent, but after that I was simply shelled and struggled home.
Sunday – After Saturday’s pathetic showing, I just wanted an endurance ride on the PCs to keep building training load. 3:10 long ride just burning some calories.
What a long week. 921 TSS points and I drove my TSB down to –31 and my CTL up to 108. I’m looking forward to a couple of easy days before hitting it hard again. Race season is just around the corner.
PC time this week – 9 hours 55 minutes
PC time to date – 160 hours 5 minutes
Nothing to report on the progression front. I set some new bests using Powercranks in the 60-90 minute range for average power. These were yearly bests, but they are best since using PCs. Given the intensity this week, I wasn’t expecting to be really fresh to pop through some plateaus.
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