2x20 at FTP

With only an hour or so before I had to do some chores I planned to do another 2x20 at FTP. The first session went well with a nice steady power output and a gently rising heart rate and beating the 307W target by 2W. The second session started well but quickly got ugly. After 12 minutes I started to have doubts I would be able to complete it with a highish HR and a lot of sweat dripping off my nose. It was then that the 'bouncing' started; periods of feeling OK interspersed with periods of feeling terrible but never feeling good. I've highlighted the suffering portion in the graph below:

Black = Power. Red = HR.

Normally I'd have stopped at this point, had a shower and put it behind me but I was determined to finish the session on target. With 3 minutes to go I started a hard push which lasted about 30 seconds before I had to back off and then with 2 minutes I started to ramp up to increase my average power from 304W to my target of 307W, rocking from side-to-side. I managed to finish with an average of 306W. So close but not quite there!

After a short recovery I was able to do some messing around to get my total calories up to 1000 and finished with a Bikescore (TSS) of 88.

The Hell of the North - completed

After a day at work looking forward to an hour on the turbo, I snuck off early and got the torture chamber set up and ready for The Hell of the North (set up here). YouTube loaded, Golden Cheetah running, Garmin recording, Go!!!

The first 5 minutes is a fairly relaxed warm-up before the fun starts as Boonen attacks and the intervals start. I won't ruin it for you and let you know what happens, but here's the plot of the first 65 minutes with lots of Zone 4 work mixed with short rest intervals in Zone 2. I liked that you never knew what was coming next or how long the current interval or rest would last; it made it much more interesting and less of a chore than a normal interval session. The film is also really good and helps to take your mind off any pain you're suffering.

The power plot looks like this showing that it's mainly a Zone 4 workout. Black line = power. Red line = HR. Green line = Cadence.

Stats for the hour:

Average power: 272W
xPower: 274W - my FTP is 307 therefore it's roughly 89%
Average HR: 156
Max HR: 169 (my LTHR is 174)
kCals: 970
IF: 0.89
Bikescore (TSS): 79

If you run it with Golden Cheetah (or Trainer Road) and overlay YouTube it looks something like this (the video is actually better but the screenshot makes it look worse that it is):



Next time I'll do a longer warm-up (15 minutes) and then I'll be able to do the whole workout to the end and I'll hold back earlier on. I found I was letting my power creep up above the 307W or 270W targets which may have impacted later on in the workout. Today's hour went very very quickly.

The Hell of the North (workout)

AMENDMENT on 7 Dec 12. See additional info in red at the bottom of this post for a slightly dfferent version.

While slogging away on the turbo yesterday my mind wandered and I started to think about how I could make my own workout videos, and then it hit me. Use existing videos of cycling events and add my own intensities based on what's on the screen.

Welcome to the first, The Hell of the North (named after the iconic Paris-Roubaix race used as the backdrop). Basically, load this YouTube video, press play and follow the rules below.....

The rules: Use mine or make up your own rules.

First 5 minutes is a warm-up - ride at Intensity 3
Whenever Boonen is on screen (including helicopter shot) - ride at Intensity 1
Whenever somebody else is on the screen - ride at Intensity 2
Whenever it's a helicopter shot (non-Boonen) - ride at Intensity 3

Intensities: These are based on my power figures with relative figures shown in brackets.

Intensity 1 - FTP: 307W (100% of whatever your FTP is)
Intensity 2 - 88% FTP: 270W (88% of whatever your FTP is)
Intensity 3 - 62% FTP: 190W (62% of whatever your FTP is)

At these powers the first 20 minutes after the warm-up averages 260W (85% of my FTP which is a good sweetspot session). If you do the whole race it's a 75 minute workout.

If you don't like these intensities, make your own up! If you haven't got power, come up with some speed-related intensities.

Here's a graph of what this looks like, well, the first 25 minutes anyway....

I know that this can be overlaid on top of Golden Cheetah, and I assume it can be laid over the top of Trainer Road. And it's free.

Postscript 7 Dec 2012: I varied the workout to reduce the number of intensities from 3 to 2 to make it simpler and a bit harder. If Boonen is on the screen I work at 100% FTP and if he's not I work at 90% FTP.

Wind the video forward to 10 minutes, press play and start your 10 minute warm-up then and settle in for 60 sweaty horrible minutes of Hell of the North.

Recovery Day musings

I woke up feeling very tired this morning despite what felt like a good night's sleep so today is definitely going to be a rest day. Part of my experiement is to record how I feel after workouts, particularly if I feel like as workload may induce illness. Earlier this year I had several bouts of being run down as a results of trying to do too much with insufficient recovery and I'd like to have an idea of what I can manage without hindering near-future training.
In the last 2 days I have completed 2 workouts with a combined Bikescore (TSS) of 115+78 = 193 (the equivalent of 1.93 hours absolutely flat-out). The Hunter and Allen book suggests that Elite athletes should aim for an average daily TSS of 100 for best results. I'm aiming for somewhere between 60 and 70 per day as I have a full-time job and a life and I can't (and won't) spend all my spare time training, but I am trying to make my training as efficient as possible.

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.

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.

Last Week's Summary

At the end of the first week I can now review what I achieved:

Rides: 5 - all turbo sessions

Total Bikescore (TSS): 390

Total time in Zone 3: 0:30:00
Total time in Zone 4: 1:54:00
Total time in Zone 5: 0:38:01
Total time in Zone 6: 0:03:34
Total time in Zone 7: 12 seconds!

kCals burned (incl warm-ups and cooldowns); 4430

The HR graph for the week shows how HR distribution varied for each workout. HR Zone 4 (163-182 BPM) is shown in orange and HR Z3 (144-163) is in red. 21 and 22 Nov are the same Shorter Harder workout, 18 and 24 Nov are the same 2x20 at FTP workout, but on the sessions where I was struggling (21 and 24 Nov) I had a very high proportion of the session in HR Z4. It is interesting to note how the HR profile varied for the same workout on different days. On some days, for the same power, my HR is much higher and when my HR gets to my Lactate Threshold HR (174 BPM), I suffer and think about stopping.

 

Using last week to plan for next week:

A Bikescore (TSS) of 390 in 5 sessions was achievable with no signs of fatigue, so I would like to aim for 4-5 sessions and 430 TSS next week. With 100 TSS being the equivalent of a 1 hour workout at FTP (306W), 390 TSS is quite a good workload for the first week but I would like to increase this gradually to identify what TSS workload becomes too hard and/or too tiring. Most importantly, I don't want to hate the turbo as this will reduce my willingness to train on it.

I'm planning similar workouts targeting Z4 and Z5 for the next 3 weeks until my next 20 minute power test to see what difference this makes. I might throw in a Sufferfest session to try to break things up a bit. Maybe There Is No Try or Local Hero.