Uhl in Eagle, ID – I've been feeling better and better these last couple days so today I went out to do an old "standby" workout: 2x20's followed by tempo. This was the bread and butter of my winter training and it's been a while since I've done it. It was windy out again with gusts up to 30 MPH! But that's the beauty of using a power meter; I can still do a structured workout even if the resistance is highly erratic.
I headed out on my usual 2-hour loop. During my warm-up I was surprised to see my wattage in the 230-250 range. This was refreshing as it's been a while since my power has been higher than my perceived exertion! So after 15 minutes of warm-up I started my first 20-minute interval. It was easy to get my power up but I still wanted to be conservative, shooting for 290-300 watts. It felt easy on the lungs as I wasn't even breathing hard. My legs could feel the work, but they didn't burn, which was another good sign. I finished the interval with an average wattage of 298. The next one I went a little harder and managed 305 watts.
After the 2x20's I spun easy for a few minutes then started a tempo interval. After doing the LT's, tempo felt easy and I managed to ride for 50 minutes with a normalized power of 268 watts. Not bad! Back in the winter I'd consider this a hard workout, but today it felt relatively easy. I think I've become hardened by racing while I was overtrained. I really suffered during my last few races, even though my power wasn't anything to write home about. Seeing how much I was overtrained (by how long it took to feel better), I'm surprised I was able to finish as well as I did!
So today was a breakthrough workout. I'm still going to increase my volume slowly, as I don't want to dig myself back into a hole. The other thing I'm doing is switching to a 1-day on, 1-day off cycle. Before I was trying to "block" train (workout hard for 2-3 days, then rest 2-3 days). But I think that was part of the problem; it's hard for me to take 2-3 days easy. So 1-on, 1-off may suit me better. I'm also going to pay better attention to signs of overtraining and have updated my training diary with a couple new columns to help with this.
