Monday was a recovery day for me so I only did 30 minutes of L2 on the trainer. Today I thought I’d be fresh enough to do a VO2 workout, but maybe I needed some more rest! I wanted to do 6x5min VO2 intervals. I shot for a higher wattage than my last VO2 session, and I had success in the first two. But on the third one I started out harder, then just died after only two minutes. Even though the average wattage for the third interval looks good, it’s only because I started so hard. My power was quickly dropping after 90 seconds and my legs were hurting so bad that I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold on.

So at that point, I switched to a neuromuscular workout starting with a couple 30-second, then 15-second, and finally 7-second sprints. I performed all of them seated but varied my gearing so they were a mix of high and low cadence (BTW, if you’re looking at the graph wondering where the rest of the sprints are, I only chart efforts 30 seconds or greater). After that, I immediately went into some tempo, again mixing up my cadence, but with the majority at a lower than normal cadence for me. About an hour and thirty minutes into the workout, I could feel my legs start to weaken as if a bonk was coming on. But rather than stopping for food, which I should have had handy, I plugged along and finished 40 minutes of tempo. At that point, I stopped and ate some food, but by then it was too late; I could only stand 15 minutes more of L2 and decided to call it quits.

From the way my legs felt afterward, it was a tough workout, but I was disappointed with not completing the VO2s. I was hoping to jack up my wattage on those, but I probably should have followed the example of my last VO2 workout where I shot for lower targets and actually completed the workout. In hindsight, I don’t know what I was thinking: I was trying to do longer intervals at a higher wattage, after only one week!? Oh well, that’s OK; it was still a good workout. Total time was 2 hours even with 142 TSS and 234/257 ave/norm power.