If you tell a teamate, "I'll ride with you tommorow at 10"--
You guessed it--the trainer! I haven't touched this thing for a serious ride since before Tucson, so I figured my mind was set to go for a 3 hour spin.
WRONG! I had all the usual motivations in place--great tunes on my Ipod, TV tuned to an old Bond movie, lots of H20 and a few Hammer Endurolytes, scheduled hill-simulation intervals...but to no avail. After 1.5 hours with 30 min of "hill simulation" riding, my mind was cooked.
When I took a look out the window, however, the weatherman proved to be wrong about the bad weather for the day--it was cloudy, and the ground was wet, but no rain to be seen. The radar confirmed my hunch: there was not a drop of precipitation coming for several hours. Revitalized, I took a quick lunch break and returned to dress for the worst weather possilbe.
Turns out I didn't need a single rain jacket or neoprene sock for the entire 3 hours out and around Bellville. The legs took quite a while to warm up, but after 45 min of spinning those 2 pistons were ready to go again. I kept the wattage in the endurance zone and enjoyed the cleansing therapy of an extended solo ride during the winter. Not bad boys--I racked up a 3129 Calorie workload today and 163 TSS points. In other words, I got some seriously good base miles in without ever pushing too hard in the hills.
I can feel my endurance form coming along very well now. 2.5-3 hour rides feel short and easy. Just 12 more days of base II before a full recovery week, and then the begining of some real race work in Base III.
Matt Waite (currently in Italy) took my advice and started up a blog today. Check out the life of a cyclist in spagetti land on his blog, Wait for it Cycling.
3 comments:
Hmmm...you've opened up a can that could lead into quite a legnthly discussion...
It's a method of measuring training load using power output. That's what I'll say for now. More TSS=more training stress score. A hard, short ride may give the same TSS as a long, endurance ride.
More infor here:
http://www.peakscoachinggroup.com/PowerTrainingChapter.pdf
Man, I think I saw you out by Belleville yesterday! One of the two riders I saw the whole ride!
Yeah, that must've been me...I had a red WORS jacket underneath a clear Louis Garneau rain poncho.
Sunday was one of the rare days I only saw 2 other riders the entire way to Bellville...
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