Started the build phase workout plan with a ramp test today. My heart rate hasn’t been that high for a while! 
it’s a good marker and I now know what I need to beat next time. In the plan I trust and looking forward to seeing the results! 
A mammoth turbo session 
TdF stage on I hope 
Had an early one this morning - so straight on the bike after breakfast and immediately smashing the carbs.
I need to stop taking my training so seriously, as I carried in some apprehension after only managing to do 2/3rds of my 3 x 20 on Thursday (quads felt trashed). I scaled back to 4 x 15 @ 97% today. Legs felt bad to start with, but got through the first interval, and the legs never really got much worse.
managed 2hr Z2 afterward too 
It’s posts like this which make this thread so good for indirect training advice👍
Gardiner. Did as much as I could before pulling the plug. This one was brutal for me. Looking back on the data, my HR was elevated around 10 beats for the power in the warm up and I should have known something was up. By the end of the first set, my HR reached 181. Even for work like this, whenever I beat that high in the first interval, I never finish the workout as prescribed. I just could not hang at that HR today. Looking at the other attempts at this one recently, it seems I am not the only one who couldn’t handle this workout. Only 1 of the past 20 attempts at this workout was completed at prescribed intensity and without any back pedals. Everyone else quit early, dropped intensity to finish or backpedaled intervals to finish. That makes me feel better seeing that I did about what most everybody else could do before calling it quits.
Birch. Then because it was my heart and not my legs that were the problem with Gardiner, I decided to just spin through Birch until today’s stage of the Tour was over. Power match was a bit off on this for me though. I was regularly noticing my power sitting 10-12 watts above what was prescribed even when keeping a steady cadence on ERG mode. Going to look into that one.
At 3hr30 you’ve already gone two hours past my mental time limit for any sort of indoor ride!
. I like to keep some reduced intensity during recovery weeks, a habit I’ve carried over from my pure runner days. Admittedly I might have gone a little overboard this week though!
Sounds and looks brutal that workout! How long are the interval spikes on that one? Also, how do you check to see the success/failure rate of workouts on TR?
They are 8 minutes sets of 15 seconds on and 15 seconds off. It’s called Gardiner and it is in the first week of Criterium Specialty for my plan.
If you go to the workout’s page on TR (not your data page; scroll to the bottom for a link to the source workout like the link to Gardiner above), you can scroll to the bottom and there are three tabs. One is for the variations of the workout, the second is for My Rides and the last one is All Rides. Whenever I do a workout I’ve never done and fail it (like Gardiner today), I’ll check the All Rides tab to see if I’m the only one who is struggling with it or if I just need to harden up. I also take a lot of notes on my workouts, so I use the My Rides tab in the lead up to a workout I recognize or have done before. This often lets me know how I can prepare better for it (nutrition, headspace, etc.) to get the most out of the time on the bike.
It’s a totally amazing feature of TR that isn’t really talked about much by anyone. The only thing I would suggest they add is a way to select text in your notes that you want to keep private (like personal life stressors you’d rather not share with strangers, for example). As it stands now, if your account is public, it shows everything to every TR user if they go looking, including all of your notes. I like the idea of seeing other people’s notes (it has helped me prep for workouts before), but I also think it can feel invasive reading what some rando ate for dinner the night before and breakfast the day of the workout and what their weekend plans are between rides.
Legend! Thanks heaps for explaining this. I will definitly use this function moving forward as some of the AC and VO2 sessions I am doing are pushing me right to the edge! Which, all things being equal, is exactly where I need to be in the higher end sessions. Generally speaking my breakfast prior to the sessions says otherwise.
I also didn’t know this about the notes. Interesting. Will be good to cast my eye over some of the notes and see how they found the AC and VO2 sessions. Might even get a few new meal and/or recipe recommendations out of it too by the sounds of it, haha!
Last hard workout for short power build. Wasn’t feeling it but powered through, cadence was lower than usual and that made the last 15mins a slog. But I got through it because I kept telling myself I’m normally a sweet spot machine and I get to take it easy this week (although I’m aiming to do a solo century on Saturday or Sunday)
Same as last week, keeping my HR pegged at a low level while I work my way through the post-covid issues. If you look closely at the 6:00 point of the ride, you see the heart rate disconnect from the effort. I could feel it happen at the moment – it was basically a huge adrenaline surge out of nowhere – and I have figured out to just back off when it happens and let my autonomic nervous system calm back down. I’m hoping to begin some more frequent efforts like this if the body will allow it.
Long run day. 1hr 45 LSD. Beautiful morning with some cooler temps and nice breeze. Floated through this one in my new Atreyu shoes which felt oh so nice under my feet. For $55 USD these things perform pretty damn well and handled like much pricier champs. Durability TBD but pleased so far. “Recovery” week wrapped, time to get back to work tomorrow.