Today's training session sounded like a lot of fun.
2½ hours riding with 20 minutes warm up at Zone 2, Followed by 10 minutes of Sweet Spot which is a narrow band of power at the top of Zone 3/bottom of Zone 4, then 10 minutes (or so) of easy effort.
I chose a route that was on undulating larger roads for this - one I've used quite a lot so I had a pretty good idea where I'd be on the road for the first part of the session.
20 minutes of Zone 2 was pleasant and the 10 minutes of Sweet Spot felt strong and not overly tiring, and the 10(ish) minutes of easy pedaling brought me just shy of the section of road I'd identified for the hard efforts that were to come next.
The schedule said:
6 x 2min efforts (105s upper zone 5, then 15s sprint)
use a small descent to bring you up to speed then start your effort at the bottom of the descent.
7 mins between efforts.
I underestimated by just 2 minutes how long it would take me to get to the small descent I'd chosen which led on to a perfect flat section of road for the efforts, and pulling up once it was done and returning to just beyond the top of the start descent at an easy effort, took the requisite 7 minutes!
The best efforts were the 1st, 4th and last.
I was pleased with the Zone 5 bits, but I feel that although I sprinted as hard as I could, that the numbers and the speed differential I generated were a bit disappointing.
I said as much in the notes I sent to James my coach, but we already know that Top End Power is a weakness, and much of what we will be doing will be aiming to address that!
I'll be interested in his feedback about it.
The ride back home was lovely. I chose some of the roads I've not ridden much this year. It kept me off the roads with traffic and made for a very pleasant (mostly) Zone 1 finish.
There's a good chance I'm still a wee bit fatigued from the two long hard endurance weekends that I've just done, but mostly I think that this session illustrated very nicely what I need to work on!!
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