Morning Ride on 9/19/2006 - Big Gear Climbs

Today was a sport-specific strength-building workout designed to improve my strength on the bike, and hopefully to help me become more powerful riding hills on the tri-bike. For this workout, I designed a custom Computrainer course. It was supposed to give me a 6 mile warm up at a 0.5% grade between L1 and L3 efforts. Following the warm up, I would launch into a series of 8 hills, each at an increasing grade from 4-6%. The goal was to stay seated and maintain a cadence between 50-70 rpms and power output at around L4 level. Unfortunately, I don't think I've quite figured out all of the Computrainer nuances that go along with building custom courses. I thought I'd built a course that was 20 miles long, and should have taken slightly longer than one hour to complete. I think the CT may have used metric measurements, 'cause I ended up doing about 13 miles, and it took me only 45 minutes. No biggie this early in the off season, but I need to figure that one out. :)

On the left, you can see the graph of the ride. As ususal, pink = power, red = heart rate, blue = speed and green = cadence. After the warm up, the hill climbing intervals began. You can see from the graph that I started out too hard. The first 5 or 6 intervals have an average power that is much higher than my L4 effort range (250-291). So, I was actually doing some VO2max work here. In the last 2-3 intervals, power dropped a bit, but was probably still too high. Interestingly, my HR seemed to be a bit low, and never really got solidy into the L4-L5 range. I think this is because the hills were short enough ((1-2 min) that my HR never really had a chance to catch up to my effort before I was in the midst of a rest interval. At about the 34 minute mark, I switched back to a constant 0.5% grade and reduced my effort to around L2-L3 level. At that point, I thought I still had nearly half an hour to go, so I decided to do some high effort 30" spin-ups. Those are short intervals you see at the end. Unfortunately, my workout ended on me before I could finish all the spin-ups. So, I didn't get a cool down and I was short-changed 15 minutes. Next time, I'll make sure I have the right units.

UPDATE

Yep, the Computrainer workout was set to use metric measurements. My first clue should have been the section of the workout file that said "Units: METRIC." :) My second clue should have been the computer screen during the workout, which indicated the course distance at 12½ miles, which is approximately 20 kilometers. Okay... lesson learned.