No doubt about it, I struggled big time with today’s SST session.
In hindsight I kinda knew I would, before hand. My day didn’t quite go to plan, and with the kids in what, week 11 of the lock down, I’d hit my stress limit by 4pm and decided a fairly intense bike ride was the suitable cure.
Wrong.
Within the first 10 minutes I was deeply regretting my choice, and by half way I was ready to give up.
Keeping cadence at or around 95rpm was overly hard, my legs felt exhausted, though mentally I was strong enough to keep pushing through. I put that down to the afore mentioned stress / stress relief.
Perhaps an easy ride would have been a much better fit today. Sure enough, that’s what I am going to do tomorrow.
I think this comes off the back of two fairly long rides over the weekend, though I would have expected to have been in a little better position today, having done Sunday’s ride in the morning, and taken yesterday as a rest day. That said, I did do twenty minutes on the Nintendo Switch, on a game called Ring Fit.
Anyway, glad to have done the ride, regardless of how knackered I felt during it. I had briefly considered whacking up the intensity such that I would be riding at ~240w during the “on block”, but my God that would have been a bad idea.
I do think there’s some merit in the idea of starting with 5 minute blocks of 242w, in anticipation of retaining that pace for the 20m FTP session I must complete before the end of the year, if I am to meet my yearly goal of that 230w FTP.
But right now, it’s a bit of rest and recovery that’s needed much more than a higher FTP figure.
