What the heck even is an ‘anaerobic attack’ workout? Never done one of those. But, looking at the chart definitely some of my favorite workout types are at the top: hard starts, sustained threshold, float set VO2…love them. If I searched the forum for how many times I typed ‘hard start’ in a post there would be many hits, I bet.
But I’ve never done an anaerobic attack workout & it’s a step function worse than any other workout type. Right. Sounds like fun so I let AI put one on my calendar, because TR advised me that if I pick the workout myself I’m likely to pick one that is too easy. Sure enough, my first thought when seeing the workout was: that’s too hard.
Somebody told me once that we should all ‘do hard things’ & it always seemed like if that was the cornerstone of your life’s philosophy you should probably, you know, flesh that out a little…but just in this one instance I’m going to adopt that minimalist philosophy and see what an ‘anaerobic attack’ workout is really like.
Damn most of these at the top are on the CX plan, Hell I’m doing the CX plan
On Hard Starts, those have left me standing beside the bike at the end with my legs shaking.
What is The Priest+5 and Owl+5 strikes fear into my heart.
Add in also the family that has this in the description: Carson/Tahoe/Reno road race course.
I remember they where Vo2 attacks, Keeps was one of them.
Are these workouts even prescribed? Could also be the correlation Jonathan mentioned of self-prescribed workouts more often resulting in failure.
Regardless, neither of those workouts appear to be harder than higher level 30/15s, or hard start float sets like Xalibu which was prescribed on the old school TR plans.
I really like anaerobic attacks, did series of them in January 2026. Up to PL 5.7 (Kara) they felt moderate, got hard only from PL 6.2 (Roderic).
But as it was said on the podcast: if they felt moderate, I probably didn’t do them right
Fair point. I stuck to the prescribed 150-154% FTP for 5x30/30 part, which was likely too conservative for me. Probably my FTP was set a bit low back then, so the whole workout ended up easier than intended.
Well I tried Cache, served to me by AI. That’s a 5.8 anaerobic workout. While it was for sure proper hard, don’t be scare, homies. Possibly @Un-QuittingBikes is on to something & there is just some baked-in sample bias that moves these workouts up the difficulty scale.
If these workouts are featured in CX plans per @Kendogz161 I could see somebody doing 40/20s Tuesday, hard start threshold Thursday, and an anaerobic attack workout Sat/Sun…week 1 it’s hard but satisfying, week 2 you’re hanging on by your fingernails, and week 3 that anaerobic attack workout becomes anaerobic crack instead.
I’ve done The Priest multiple times as a part of XC race plan. Just looked it up in my Strava history–even if I successfully nailed the workout, it’s skull and crossbone emojis in the notes.
The Priest is a good workout. Like I said: I’m a big fan of hard start threshold intervals.
But, just to explicitly state how this thread went, I’m the one who started talking about The Priest. @Kendogz161 brought up The Priest +5, which is a much more difficult workout. I just started talking about The Priest as kind of a short hand reference.
The Priest +5 doesn’t appear in my ride history, but if I compare the two ride feeds, only about 53% of athletes completed The Priest +5. About 77% of athletes completed The Priest. (in both cases n=30). Neither workout is easy, but The Priest +5 is a much harder workout.
Killington is not all that difficult. I was able to watch downhill races on UTube. I did fiid the long sweet spot stuff annoying. If I can do it at 76 years young you can too
