Sounds efficient.
Sadly, it was quite the failure.
Last night I went out and pushed too hard, silly me. I knew I didn’t have much time before the sunlight faded so I went fast for 20 minutes, overdoing it on what absolutely should have been a rest day.
And then today, thinking that I might not get to ride tomorrow, I figured why not push myself and do an SST session, getting in a solid workout in ~50 minutes, and that way if I don’t ride tomorrow I won’t feel too badly about it.
However, even during the warm up today I knew it was going to be a struggle.
Sometimes the first block of an SST session makes me question my choices. But mentally, I tough it out.
Today it felt like I wanted to give up and that I didn’t think I’d be mentally strong enough to hold on. Even the “off” blocks at 220w were killing me.
I managed two “on” blocks and mid way through the second “off” block I’d had enough. I knew I couldn’t hang on and make it to the end. Not without burying myself, and I simply wasn’t in the right state of mind to do that.
At that point I could have called it quits.
Instead, I gave myself a breather of about 10 minutes and then decided I definitely wanted to finish the session, albeit at a much lower intensity. I must have taken it down by 10 notches, such that the off blocks were endurance, and the on blocks low tempo.
And that was pretty much enough.
So I don’t feel as bad as I would have done if I had quit at the 30 minute mark.
But I do feel pretty bad about how I performed. Perhaps I expected a little too much from myself, however. I knew I’d pushed hard yesterday. I knew that when I saw I’d done 5k in the first ten minutes. For an outside ride, that’s nuts. And without a warm up, it’s even crazier.
Like I say though, I paid the price for that today.
