Thursday Training

Hi

VeloTron

Another mixed L4/L5 session scheduled for today as I try to make some VO2 Max gains and hopefully continue to make small FTP gains over the next little while. The session was identical to Tuesday's effort with a 20 minute L4 effort @ 300W followed by 3 four minute L5 efforts @ 350W, it wasn't going to be fun!

Looking back at past records I don't think I have previously been sufficiently persistent with this type of training and I think it's going to be 3-4 weeks before I see or feel real benefits. What's happened in the past is that I think I've gone at them like a bull in a china shop, got very tired, and then pretty much given up on them.

The reason for my split session arrangement is to introduce them steadily but to try to do them twice per week and hope that I'm able to keep this up. I plan to introduce a 4th L5 effort when I feel I'm on top of this session and counterbalance this by dropping the length of the L4 effort down to 15 minutes, then add a fifth L5 effort and reduce the L4 section to 10 minutes.

Doing this my theory is that I'll end up doing effectively a 10 minute L4 warmup followed by a total of 20 minutes of L5 work in the session which is my target over the next few weeks. The last time I did a RAMP test was back in early March and at that time my MAP was 419W and my 5 minute power during that test was 369W. On this basis I now feel that 350W is a sensible starting point for my L5 work (it's in the middle of my L5 power range) and that seems to be borne out by the sessions. When I've been doing these sessions for a few weeks I'll repeat the RAMP test (oh joy) and will know once and for all, for me at least, whether this works.

All went well today. If anything I felt very slightly less uncomfortable today than I did on Tuesday, certainly no worse, and I am encouraged by this. It will be interesting to see how well, or otherwise, I recover from this as I really want to be able to keep doing these twice a week if at all possible. I have quite a challenging ride planned for Saturday so I'm hoping to be Ok for that. In the end this work has to be done if I'm going to optimise my performance and now I've started it I'm going to stick at it.

Data from tonight's session below:


Onwards and upwards!

[Uploaded 21/05/2009 21:48:23]