This morning I was on the CompuTrainer once again and doing intervals. If you recall from the last time I did this half way through the second set I just fell apart. The last 10 minute interval was even worse, probably made it 3 minutes into it before I just couldn’t keep pace. All week I’ve been thinking about that, a lot of thoughts running through my head. Was the CompuTrainer not calibrated right for the test that set the interval peaks? Did I really lose that much over vacation by not being on the bike and eating poorly? Was it just a bad day? Not hydrated?
Anyway, lots of things to think about over the course of the week. The one thing I wanted to be for this morning was mentally ready to ride. I kept going over the session in my head, thinking about the cadence I wanted to keep. I absolutely was not going to let my cadence drop because that would be sure failure, it is just to hard to bring it back up. Your mental attitude has a lot to do with what you are able to accomplish, if you don’t believe, it won’t happen for you.
I started out the session gradually building up to around a 65% effort and then there are 5 short intervals, 30 seconds hard, 30 seconds easy. Then the first 10 minute interval starts and I knew I would make it through it. It certainly wasn’t going to be easy, but I knew I could last 10 minutes and I watched my HR climb to 163 by the end of it. Then an easy 5 minutes and my HR recovered to 141 before the next interval started. Let me tell you, that was a long 10 minutes. I just kept thinking keep the cadence up. This time the HR climbed to 168 and the recovery 5 minutes had it back down to 145. Finally the last 10 minute interval, about 7 minutes in my legs were really starting to burn but I was keeping the cadence right around 88-90. I learned from the last time if I let it drop my legs wouldn’t have enough keep going. That last 3 minutes seemed to last forever, my HR went to 170 (Not sure what Coach/Nutritionist Melinda will think of that 🙂 ) and my legs were seriously hurting for the last minute. Never so happy to just spin my legs for 20 minutes after that.
So the difference between this week and last week was an average of 14 Watts or about 8%. Did my body change that much over the course of a week? I doubt it, I think I was just better mentally prepared for the session.
Weight: 169.2