Friday Training

Level 5 training is never going to be fun but even at this time of the year I regard it as an essential part of my training and it's importance rises as time passes.  Today I'd scheduled in a 6x3' session at 106-120% of FTP with 3 minute recovery periods.  The majority of the 3 minute effort periods were therefore done in the 340-360W range with levels rising up to 363W, this was never going to be comfortable.

Again the problems associated with doing this type of training using heart rate alone can be clearly seen in the power and heart rate distributions below:

The power distribution clearly shows that 18 minutes of the training time was spent in my L5 power zone, hitting exactly the physiological systems I am targeting with this session. However, looking at the power distribution one would think that essentially no training time had been spent in the zone targeted by the session, such are the problems of heart rate lag when looking at short high intensity training intervals.

The session actually went rather well, my HR was generally lower than when I last did this session and when I last did it my TSB was significantly higher than today. I have clearly lost nothing and almost certainly gained by using the ErgVideo system for a lot of my training for the last couple of weeks, I am very encouraged by this.

Really hoping to be able to get out on the road this weekend even if just for a very steady ride, unfortunately it seems to be very frosty every morning at the moment and I've no intention of riding on ice having avoided it through the worst of the winter, I'll wait a little longer if need be.

To review this session: click here.

ATL: 70.1 CTL: 63.5 TSB