Wow, Saturday’s ride took more out of me than I thought it would! I was dragging the last few days so I’ve only been putting in short, easy rides, with a complete day off yesterday. I realize that doing so would hurt my chronic training load (CTL) just when I got it up to my target of 90 TSS/day. But learning from last year, I’m going to listen to my body and not be a slave to hours, TSS, or any other metric. Training is part science and part art!

But today I felt a bit better so I got on the trainer with the plan that if I felt good, I’d have a go at a 60-minute test. After a 30-minute warm-up with a 2-minute push at FT, I felt good enough to go for it. I turned on all the fans and started the interval timer. The first 10-20 minutes weren’t that bad, and I purposely kept my wattage below threshold for that time period. Unfortunately, the next 20 minutes weren’t as good and it was becoming harder and harder to maintain, let alone, increase my wattage as I had planned. So at the 40-minute mark, I decided to make it a 45-minute LT interval. I kicked it up the last few minutes, but it was obvious that going for another 15 minutes would not have been pretty!

After that interval, I spun easy for a few minutes and then did 2×10-minute microintervals, where I alternate between 15 seconds “on” and 15 seconds “off”. In the first one, I changed gears between the big- and small-rings for each microinterval. During the second set, I stayed in the same gear and just spun really fast on the “on” portion. Both intervals felt good…well, I should say hard. These intervals really seem to simulate racing very well, in particular, doing a crit where you’re sprinting out of every corner.

Though I didn’t complete the 60-minute test as I had planned, it ended up being a great workout. Total ride was 2 hours even with a TSS of 149.