First Race 2011: OUCH That was hard!



So yesterday I headed outside for my first interval session outside for 2011. After the brutal race last weekend it was obvious I need to get some hard A.C. efforts in so I could force a bit of adaption and get my legs/lungs/heart/and HEAD….. ready for the next race.
Racing with a power-meter makes it super easy to tweak training so it mimics the demands of racing. I have a local hill near my house that is around 90 seconds long. It depends on the wind direction. Some days it takes 2 minutes and others it is 80 seconds. I repeat the hill non-stop for 1 hour. The grade is only 2-5% so you can big ring the entire hill if you get out of the saddle.
Here is a quick comparison of the HOUR OF POWER intervals compared to a very hard Road Race. (see attached screen shot)
Both have low average power… but very high NORM power. They are both desperate. It is shocking how similar 1 hour of intervals mimics the specific demands of racing.
You can see in the attached file I have a circle where the 2 man break went up the road. It was more of a SPLIT(selection) than a break. I was getting dropped when they attacked. So even the DATA when you fail is valuable. You can learn so much from race files it is shocking.

So remember this season when you are suffering the most that you are actually in the laboratory creating some data that someday we will use to tweak and change your training.