Saturday 14 June 2008

A Variation on Intervals and a Speed Surprise

Heart rate profile: you can see those intervals!

My Coach of Cruelty assigned me two big workouts today. Unfortunately, after a glorious week of excellent weather, the weekend has fallen apart somewhat with thunderstorms and threatening skies. So instead of an early start for Workout No. 1, there was a late start and Workout No. 1 And Only.

My task: Lactate reps. After warm-up do 2 sets of 4 x 40 seconds (20-second recoveries) with 5 minutes between sets. Do each at near-max effort. 100+ rpm. This sounds fairly easy but, in fact, near-max effort is still near-max effort. As you can see from the heart rate profile, I did in fact ace the workout (the first set of intervals being into a nasty headwind) but by the time I was done I was quite exhausted. My maximum heart rate was 169 bpm, but what really surprised me was my maximum speed, which came up as 52.2 km/h, on a bike with a compact crank. This bodes well for the next time trial--I think I really have to work on my cadence and get spinning more. Not that this hasn't been pointed out to me...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Leslie - what does 4x40 seconds mean? Is that the same as 160 seconds?

Sprocketboy said...

In the end, sort of. There are four intervals of 40 seconds each, with 20 seconds "recovery" in between.