With Monday being a much longer ride than is typical I have definitely felt it in my right knee in particular ever since. Today’s ride had a touch of jitters worrying whether I’d be in any kind of pain. Fortunately it didn’t seem to be.
Lately on my weekday rides I’ve been aiming to do a solid 20 minute effort twice a week. That would ideally be Tuesday and Thursday, with an easier / tempo day in between. So far that’s been paying dividends for me.
With the concerns for my knee, and some boredom of hitting the same route over and over, I opted to come at the route from a different angle today. This, unfortunately, meant the ability to put the power down in a 20 minute effort is not as easy as my usual route, but after an extended ~10 minute warm up, I gave it a shot.
As I’d not hit the lap timer on this one, I wasn’t fully aware how hard or long I’d been going. So this was a bit of a guesstimate.
It turns out I guessed wrong and came up 5 minutes short.
The first 5 minutes were at a lower intensity as I was on a down hill. I was making good speed but not high watts. After that the stretch of road turns into a moon surface, and then there’s a T junction meaning a complete stop. From there I was able to be a little more consistent.
So I already said, sometimes these hard efforts won’t always work. There’s the outdoors element with cars and other road traffic that have the bad habit of getting in the way. I’m not expecting to set new records every ride.
The key thing really is just to try. 15 minutes is good. 20 is better, but that’s not something I’m going to beat myself up about.
At 103km on the week, I’m already way up on where I was last week. So that’s great. I’ll try again tomorrow, weather permitting, to do something of a little higher intensity. However I’d quite like to head out into the hillier side of the countryside and do one of my other favourite loops. As that one is a little undulating I’m not sure how feasible a 20 minute effort would be there. But I guess we can try.
