Ready for college?
Circumstances of late dictate that my work day gets
started at 6:30 in the morning. The long
days of summer mean that a pre-work run isn’t entirely in the dark. It also means that a ride after work can
start at four and still have plenty of light.
The other day after a full day at the office I drove home
and in no time I was in my kit filling bottles.
After checking my tire pressure I got rolling. My body was shocked by the transition from
zero physical activity all day to suddenly pedaling my bike. “Oh, we’re doing this now?” my legs questioned
me.
The climb up and away from my home is a good warm
up. I start easy and spin a low gear. The climb goes quickly.
Thirty minutes later I am off of the roads and onto a
wide bike path where I won’t be competing for space with cars. It is rush hour now and the laws of physics
clearly favor the automobiles over cyclists.
I check my bike computer.
The agenda today is for seated thirty second power efforts every five
minutes with Z3-Z4 tempo in between.
Then after six of those I hold tempo for ten minutes then I do a ten
minute hard effort and return to tempo for twenty more minutes. The idea of this workout is you don’t get to
spin easy to recover. You just return to a hard, yet less than Z5, effort.
Each interval goes through the life cycle of, this is
fun, this is hard, this has gone on long enough, this hurts, and finally, this
is done.
As the song goes, "Late December back in '63"
Summer is here and it is a great day to be fit and
riding. I am glad to see my arms and
legs exposed to the sunshine. My arms
glisten with sweat. My bike sings as I shift smoothly up and down the
cassette. My bike feels fast and I feel
strong.
I back off my effort for the final half hour of my two
hour ride, but I still throw in some “situational” efforts. That is to say I power up the little climbs
and have a couple extended out of the saddle efforts. I coast down the hill to home feeling like I
have done something.
It felt good to be doing intervals again. The training
for France was largely all volume all the time.
I was nervous about throwing in any intervals. Now, I’m not so nervous and it felt good to
ratchet up my efforts. Intervals are
kind of like diets. Everyone knows they
work, it is just hard to actually do it.
One could logically ask if I feel stupid being a
grandfather and doing intervals like I was twenty years old. My answer is that when I am doing intervals;
I AM twenty years old.
