This morning I started my week on clearly very tired legs. Strange, really, considering how I’d felt at the end of Sunday’s climb. I’m not sure if the tiredness was entirely physical, or whether having increased my FTP from 206w to 214w had a mental impact on today’s training session.
Almost immediately into the first set, I was feeling well worn in the thighs. It was going to be a looong 40 minutes, and honestly, more than at any point I can remember recently, I really wanted to cut this one short.
The differences between the Short SST session at 214w and the same at 206w were more noticable in the “off” block. Today’s session was 4 repeats of 205w / 190w, whereas previously this would have been 200w / 180w. Those extra 10w in the off block meant any recovery had to be done at a higher intensity.
Really, the differences here are likely not that big. They potentially felt worse today, as above, for either reasons around the physical tiredness after Sunday. Or … or maybe AND / OR, the mental impact of having to work that little bit harder first thing in a morning was enough to make me feel worse. Or of course, a combination of both.
Now, whilst I’m saying the differences in wattages are fairly small, there are some noticeable differences in the Strava stats. For one, I burned 532 calories today, whereas a typical SST session at 206w was averaging around 510 calories. More work in the same amount of time. This worked out at around 0.5km speed increase. Not much, but over a race that’s pretty huge for me.
The other big metric today that I was paying attention too more than usual was my heart rate. Typically SST sessions have come in at 169bpm as a max heart rate. Today I was up to 175bpm, which whilst not amazingly high by my standards, it certainly shows I was working that much harder today. However, I averaged 149bpm today, which is a single beat per minute lower than the last SST session I did. Unexpected.
I’m kinda thinking today should have been an active recovery session. Whilst I’m not saying I was absolutely thrashed – heck, I had a rest day yesterday, and I did complete this session – I think being more concious of the intensity of rides / workouts would make more sense. Previously I would always follow a hard climb with a recovery ride. Not sure why I didn’t do that today.
On the plus side today I was fairly comfortable at around 94-96rpm for the whole ride. All eight blocks were fairly consistent today. I would like to work more thoroughly on my cadence / pedalling efficiency. I’ve not yet checked, but I’m guessing there are videos / drills on YouTube that I can watch and learn from.
Lastly for today, it’s nice to be working at or around 7 minute laps on the Volcano Circuit when using the SST session intervals. I’m wondering just how close I could get to a sub 6 second lap if I really went for it. Though that said, for me it’s more preferable to do 20 consistent 7 minute laps, rather than one all-out 5m Xs laps.
Tomorrow will almost certainly be active recovery at this stage. Even with the uptick in FTP, this will be 154w blocks rather than the previous 150w blocks. Be nice to have an easier ride… and to think, I so often moan they are boring!
