First indoor workout in a bit, as it was 
, it was a doable (below PL) Threshold workout. Garmin actually rated it as Tempo probably because it was an over under session bookended by 15minute of Z2. I can’t believe I hadn’t realised that I was better to have my gym fan on my left rear and blower in it place. It made it seem exactly how it should in what I’d normally say was too warm (21deg C average).
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Today I chucked a 100km brevet permanent audax on the calendar to sub for my weekend Z2. Horizontal Hundred, about the flattest 100km route going around these parts, & free-flowing for the most part. The right ingredients for a proper Z2 ride, except for the stoppages required to get a brevet card signed plus one signalled intersection. It’s about 50/50 cycleway & public roads.
I’ve already typed it into Strava so I’ll let that tell the story:
Still from a video during the suburban jaunt. It was nice to go somewhere other than the cycleway. No photos from the foreshore because there was too much going on there. Let’s just say there was a lot of pedalling against brakes, trying to stick to 206w whilst staying behind cars at 15kph.
So the workout was Mount Bear. It’s mostly Z2 with some short Z3 intervals sprinkled in. I picked it because it looked easier to manage on the route than the Z2 offerings around 3½h & 160TSS.
I thought I did alright with the targets (accidentally rearranged the workout a little) & I contemplated associating the workout with the ride, but declined because of the stoppages (not really compliant). Plus I’m on TB2 which must have the most Z3 of any plan & I don’t really want to be doing L7-9 Z3 workouts for the next fortnight.
The current L4-5 offerings will do just nicely thankyouverymuch.
Elapsed time on route was 3h26’, but I started 9’ late so 3h35’ will be recorded.
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My Masters Plan hasn’t had a VO2max workout in a while but they are in the next block which starts on Tuesday. A 1.6 PL has sat there for weeks then today it swapped to a 6.4 which I was a bit dubious of.
Anyway back to today my group ride got cancelled because of heavy thunderstorms forecast all day. So I fired up TrainNow and it suggested a Level 5.3 VO2max workout (Mills), it felt pretty hard and the last few hard start intervals are a bit weak. But having got through and seeing that my W’bal wasn’t quite depleted (2.3) I am pretty confident that AI’s 6.4 suggestion for Tuesday is doable (just), if I don’t let group rides get in the way (I’ve just been asked for a 2up on Monday 
).
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Ok I have a double here. Last week 5/31 I did Warlow but had to take a break on interval 3 for about a minute.
This bugged me because I knew I could do that workout.
So today I qued up Warlow and got my payback.
May not have been the wisest move training wise.
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I really like Warlow… from a self-coaching perspective anyway: I feel like it’s the workout that best tells me if my FTP is accurate. From an athletic perspective, like all productive threshold work: yuk! 
Well done, enjoy your revenge on it!
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I’m on week three of a nine weeks Build Phase on the CX plan.
Build has been taking me to school so when I saw that A.T. gave me The Owl +2 an Achievable, I was not complaining.
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I hope youse will humor my weird sense of humor for the story of my week so far.
Third week of Traditional Base 2 MV. (The second time around; this whole year so far has been all about that base 
) I felt good after riding the 100km back from my sister’s place on Sunday, next week is a de-load, so I decided I’d empty the tank on the coming weekend with two audax rides: a 200km fairly close to home & a 100km that starts 85km away. (I’ll decide how I feel on Saturday night whether I do Sunday’s commutes by car, or by bike which would make it a 270km day & a 500km weekend.) Plus I wanted to do a proper Z2 workout, so I decided to squish all my workouts together this week to give me a day off before the big weekend. My pattern of audax rides every second weekend over the last few months has caused my relative effort chart on Strava to have kittens, & I’m expecting that to continue. 
Monday: Morning strength training then in the evening Eyre +1. Easy, cut the recovery period from 15’ to 5’. Sometimes those long recoveries bore me.
Then it de-rated Wednesday’s kitchen-sink faux-sweetspot 6.7 Roan High to 5.6 Big Fodderstack.
Tuesday: Was to be a day off but I did an easy 5k jog then brought forward Saturday’s Z2 L6.0 Dombai. Two laps of the near suburbs & lucky with traffic so zero seconds coasting detected in 2h26’. (Actually there were a few moments when negotiating ramps between roads & cycle paths that I had to momentarily coast for fractions of a second for stability’s sake, but let’s just ignore that. 
) Rated it moderate. Felt ever so slightly harder than the previous day’s ride. I think it was a chartreuse day: the battery was slightly depleted but not quite enough to call it a yellow day.
Wednesday: This is where I reveal that I’ve been going off-script a little. Tuesday made it yellow, wanting to adapt my SS down to a short & very easy Z2. I ignored both the original plan & the adaptation, & loaded up the SS6.3 Antelope +1. (Current SS level is 6.9.) I’ve been trading out all those kitchen sinks for steady-state SS intervals so that hard steady-state work is less of a shock to me when I have to do 1×Z4 & 2×SS each week next block.
Hit all my targets but it was definitely hard. Didn’t cut any recovery time here; I needed every second of those 2½ minutes between! 
Knocked off another strength session in the evening, then I saw that TR had an adaptation for me.
It decided it would be a good idea to trade out Friday’s tempo intervals for tempo-with-sprints. The PL jump up to the suggested Puducherry was startling.
I thought briefly, what the hell kind of juice is AT on with that massive jump?!
Clearly it really wanted me to do those sprints! No way in hades was I getting away with doing a 2½h L9.7 “Breakthrough” workout on Friday without affecting my planned thirty-or-so-hour weekend. Wednesday’s workouts had made today (Thursday) yellow too. Then I looked at the actual workout: three 10-second 500-watt efforts, whatevs, & there’s really only 30’ of tempo work & the rest is high Z2. I thought… Oh, you’re on! 
It’s the last proper workout of the block, I’ve backed myself into a corner if I’m going to get the work done. If I’m going to go down it might as well be in flames. 
It actually went alright. Yes I was counting the minutes down in the second tempo interval & my cadence suffered for the first hour of the workout but I got through it all. Rated hard & answered the struggle survey with fatigue.
So now I have this thoroughly ridiculous looking progression levels chart with a tempo PL that will probably never bear any fruit, well, unless I decide to do my concoction that is Dexter -1… apparently now achievable!
Not in this block.
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Today I got blessed with The Priest 
This was my last Thershold in the training block, Anaerobic is up next 
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I know this is 2.5 months later, but colour me impressed that you can hold 500W for 5minutes! Those numbers aren’t messing around.
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You’re very kind. 5 min power is up to 523w watt now, but it’s a little tough to test here due to the lack of longer climbs.
Had a cracking 2hrs of power today on rough, technical gravel. I did the route yesterday with a tourist from the UK, and the course was so good I thought I’d have a pop at it again this morning at my own pace. Didn’t quite crack 30kph (rough, twisty, undulating gravel through the forest) but came close. 2hr power PB of 363w (intervals says 356w, but it’s because I had to stop for a minute to adjust my mech), but final stats were 363w/382w NP for a smidge over 2hrs.
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Crikey! The longest I’ve held 363 for was about 7 minutes.
Free ride today with a target to hit power PR’s for 30 sec, 1 min, 2 min, 5 min. I was very unsure if I should start with the longer or shorter intervals. Went with longer. The 5 min felt like my heart was going to explode. The 2 min felt like my legs were going to fall off.
I’ve never really targeted PR’s at any of these durations prior, they were always set in TR interval sessions, outdoor rides, or races. I’m happy to now have a good baseline. I hit PR’s on each duration I attempted.
I had 8 minutes as a “might try” target, but definitely didn’t have the oomph needed to give it a shot.
5 mins 341>359
2 mins 398>424
1 min 474>505
30 sec 549>635
Average power 150, NP 260 
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Givens -3
The two breaks were because I had some issues with the trainer.
Really had trouble with finishing the intervals, like literally should not have lasted 1 second longer.
Lately feel like my pollen allergies are costing me a few %. This was vo2Max 5.5 PL so I’m really happy I could finish it despite the allergies and the warmth.
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I recently swapped my training plan from a TT focused one to a rolling road race one and got to my first VO2 workout in this base phase. TR had the placeholder workout around 1.5PL and as the days were counting down to the workout it bumped it to a 5.2 then after doing my Sunday ride it adapted the workout to a 7.0, Rattlesnake +1. It seemed like it was going to be very spicy, but when doing it, I was surprised how manageable it ends up being once you get through the first interval. Now I’m a bit worried about what will come after this haha. 
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Its been thunderstorms in the east of England today so I skipped my group ride this morning and fired up TrainNow. Just when I was thinking it had dried up nicely and I would make it an outdoors workout and go out and get back before the TdF finish, the skies opened again 
. So I watched the TdF and set up the bike on the fixed fork rollers and did the Z2 workout.
It was pretty warm though:
Thankfully () it was too sticky for the sweat I was covered in to drip off the body!
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I had a really good high speed gravel ride today.
I’m just back from a week in Norway in the mountains, which was preceded by a week of cycle tour leading. So 50hrs, almost 1100km and 18000m in two weeks.
Headed out this evening for a 40-70km ride (not set in stone) and did 43kph of gravel at 35.2kph, which is by far the fastest I’ve done a circular gravel route. Technical, with some hills too.
398w NP/380w actual for 72 minutes. It’s a bit more than I’ll need to do for the UCI Worlds Qualifier, which is just as well as it wouldn’t be sustainable much past 90 minutes.
Very happy indeed.
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Gotta take the bad with the good.
Power meter pedals are still waiting for new pedal bodies so since the start of last week I’ve been doing workouts via HR. Probably not the recommended way of doing things but it’ll be somewhere in the ballpark.
Today was Antelope +3. Last time I did it via power was 4 weeks ago with the cadence in the 100-105 range, & HR averaged 146, 148, 150, 151, 151, 150.
Today’s HR was a bit lower for intervals 3-6 with cadence about the same:
Rated all-out. I decided to exclude this one from PL calculations. A bit fatigued: I reflected that sweetspot done the day after a non-lazy Z2 workout on a yellow day is no joke. And for the rest of the day, climbing steps left a longer-than-usual burn in my legs. But I still went to the gym later. 
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Had my first anaerobic workout of my build block and my legs had left the chat by the third set with 4 total sets. I still finished as best I could with my power falling off on the second half of the long intervals (45 and 60s at 147% and 140%) and near the end of the short ones (20s and 30s at 153% and 160%). I felt fantastic through the second set but knew it was coming on the longer intervals. Going from no anaerobic workouts other than whatever I get from Zwift races to a 5.8, I’ll take it. Plus I just had my volume increased by the volume checker so my weekday hard workouts are now 90 instead of 75 min. Definitely marked all out. I’ll see what the plan does with my upcoming anaerobic workouts in the coming weeks in response.
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