Showing posts with label sufferfest. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sufferfest. Show all posts

Wednesday 13 March 2013

Revolver Road

Next in the series of indoor sessions completed on the road is Sufferfest's Revolver, essentially 16 1 min intervals at 133% FTP (400W for me) with 1 min recovery intervals between. I've done it a couple of times on the turbo and it gets a bit challenging around the 12th interval. Today I planned to do 2 sets of 10 intervals and hit a Strava segment in-between, the one I failed to beat yesterday.

HR=red, Power=black


The first bunch of intervals went well but started to grate a bit towards the end, but I was regularly exceeding the target 400W and regularly around 420W. HR was always under control and the first 20 minutes averaged 290W (xPower 314W and NP 340W).

A short 6 mins recovery later I was lined up getting ready to hit the Strava segment start point (traffic lights) at full speed. It started well, but I caught the second set of lights and that killed my overall time but I did knock 20 secs off my previous best time and I moved from 6th to 5th. I'll have to keep trying.

The second set of intervals was done on busier roads so they were a bit more disjointed and I had to do an extra one because the 4th one was stopped short by traffic and extend the 8th as I caught traffic lights near the end of it. At the end of this set of 10 I was spent and pleased to stop, achieving just 399W with a lot of grimacing on the last interval.

As sessions go, it was quite interesting to do a turbo session on the road and I seemed to suffer less than the indoor version. It's quite a simple session too, so easy to remember.

Sunday 2 December 2012

Sufferfest: Hell Hath No Fury

I had a recovery day yesterday because I went to bed on 30 Nov with a headache and I woke up yesterday with a bit of a sniffle; nothing too serious but my body wasn't happy. I can't get on the turbo for the next 3 days so I thought I'd beast myself with Sufferfest's Hell Hath No Fury. Looking at the profile on Golden Cheetah I thought it would be a challenge, but an achievable one.

The warm-up went well (small victory) and then the first 20 minute variable intensity interval got going; easy at first then ramping up. I was hanging in until about 13 mins but I was unable to complete the interval as planned so I dropped into 'recovery mode'. Rather than stopping I back off a little and try to let my body recover, slowly picking up power or maintaining power until the end of the interval. I think this is much better than stopping. Below is a plot of the first interval, Red = HR, Black = power and Blue = speed.

After a 5 minute rest I was ready for the second interval, but I'd backed the intensity off to 95% to give me a chance of completing it; or so I thought. Again, about 13 minutes I got a bad dose of 'the weakness' and I had to back off into recovery mode, getting my HR down and then slowly building my power until the end of the session. I was able to finsh with a flourish and beat the final power peak, but it was a hollow victory after all the recovering I'd done prior to it.
I didn't enjoy it and I don't think I'll be doing it again too soon. If I do it again I'll drop the intensity down to make sure I can get to the end. Considering I can achieve 2x20 at 307W, I'm slightly confused why I only achieved 1x299W then 1x290W on the 20 min intervals today. It is probably the peakiness of the intervals demonstrating the effect that variable pacing has on an interval.

Tuesday 27 November 2012

Sufferfest: The Hunted

Feeling a little sore (a strange glute soreness I've never had before) and a poor night's sleep, I was expecting to suffer when I started Sufferfest's The Hunted. With BBC iPlayer fired-up and me sitting almost naked in a kitchen with all the windows and doors open, I clicked the start button. Things started off well enough, particularly as it takes 30 minutes before you get anywhere near a sustained FTP+ effort, but when it does it's a variable 9.5 minute feast of effort above and below FTP which raised my HR to my Lactate Threshold. After a short rest itI settled into the fairly relaxed 80% FTP session which allowed my HR to drop before the final 5 minutes of increasingly challenging intervals at around 115% FTP. With a couple of minutes to go I got the usual feelings of just giving up but I was determined to finish it and just grimaced and whimpered my sweaty way to the end.

Bikescore (TSS): 78. Black line = power. Red line = HR.

Afterwards I'm feeling quite smug that I've managed to complete 2 Sufferfests in 2 days. I'll probably have a day off tomorrow before beasting myself again on Thursday. 'You have to have easy days to make sure you can do the hard days' as a wise coach once said.

Monday 26 November 2012

Sufferfest: Local Hero

After a day off the turbo yesterday and having a day off work today I was hoping for a couple of hours out on the roads to do some road sessions. Unfortunately the 2 days of continual rain has flooded all the local roads so I was doomed to another turbo session. I've had the Sufferfest Local Hero workout on Golden Cheetah for a while but I have never liked the idea of a 90 minute turbo session; today I thought I'd finally give it a go. Without the video I though it could get a bit monotonous so I ran old race videos at the same time to keep me entertained (more on that in a later post).

Here's the plot for today (complete with HR monitor faff at the start). Black line = power. Red line = HR.


Ignoring the warm-up and cooldown the session lasted 75 minutes with an average power of 263W (xPower 274) based on an FTP of 307W. At the end of the session I felt like I had some more left in my legs so I threw in a couple of extra  intervals taking the whole session up to 90 minutes with a total Bikescore (TSS) of 115. Looking at the trace you can see that the intervals just touch the top of power Zone 4 (light blue, 30 mins) and just into Zone 5 (green, 10.5 mins). My HR also looks like it was under control reaching  maximum of 168 so I was never bouncing off my Lactate Threshold and thinking about stopping or even that I was suffering too much.

So overall a good session and I felt a lot better than I expected to. Doing this workout again will probably let me know if the workout needs to be done harder or whether I was just well-rested for today.