Morning Ride - L4 Big Gear Climbs

Today is an L4 block, meaning that I have to L4 workouts (bike and run) scheduled on the plan. I started the day off with a L4 computrainer workout this morning focusing on building sport-specific strength on the bike using big gear climbs. This workout is essentially a repeat of last week's big gear climb workout, except this time I remembered to set the CT to use English measurements instead of metric, so I got the proper distances. :)

The focus of this workout is building strength on the bike in order to help me power over all those rollers on the Ironman Wisconsin bike course. My goals this year are to ride between 5-5.5 hours (~19.5-20.5 mph) on the bike, but to conserve enough energy and have enough fitness to rin between 4-4.5 hours (9-10 min/mile) on the marathon. Last time (IM Moo 2004), I was underprepared for the hills, having trained almost exclusively in pancake-flat Dallas, Tx, and way undertrained for the marathon. This translated into a 6+ hour bike split and a 5 hour (11:30/mi) ego death march on the marathon. I was pleased with my overall time, but I know I can do it faster.

On to today's ride... Like last week, this ride was a 6 mile L2 warmup at high cadence (90-95 rpm) and power output between 180 and 210 watts followed by a series of quarter-mile hills of vaying grades (4% - 6%). I finished with a cool down of another 6 miles at L2 effort. As you can see from the graph, the quarter-mile hills are the "strength-builders." I chose to climb the "hills" using fairly high gears that allowed me to maintain a cadence between 50-60 rpms and power output in the L4+ range between 275 and 315 watts. As in last week's efforts, my HR lags the power output by quite a bit. Also, I never really got into the L4 heart rate range... again probably because the efforts were so short that my HR never really got a chance to significantly increase with the effort.

I really like this workout. I think I'll make it a staple of my strength-building phase, and work on some variations to help improve my strength and power at threshold. For example, I'll probably extend the "hills" to about 2-4 minutes of climbing so I spend more time working hard. This should cause some decent training stress and hopefully improve my fitness and climbing ability in the saddle.

Next up: L4 run intervals this afternoon. Working on foot turnover speed and L4 pacing.