On Tuesday, the exercise coach at Boulder Sports Medicine Center suggested I add some higher intensity workouts into my training mix as he thought that would help me shift my Lactate Threshold graph to the right. By doing so, I would be able to do more intense work while accumulating less blood lactate.<\/p>\n
So, today I decided to do just that. My goal was to ride at a higher heartrate for longer periods of time. Until now, as I have been building my trianing base, when I my heartrate would get into the 150’s I would back off the intensity (either shift to a lower gear or drop the cadence, or both) to insure I could continue. Today, I was looking for numbers in the 140’s and 150’s.\u00a0On the flats, I found it difficult to achieve, but on the climbs it was easy to do. And, instead of backing down to my more normal climbing speeds of 7-10 mph, I continued to push the pace and climbed an average of 2-3 mph faster than normal. It was a very different feeling, but one of power and strength. I surprised myself by being able to maintain the increased level of intensity without “blowing up.” I kept the increased pace on the flats and attacked every hill I came upon. I was literally FLYING!<\/p>\n
After an hour of this, I had covered just shy of 18 miles! And I still felt great. Amazing. I finished off the last half hour of the ride going through city streets and having to deal with numerous stop lights. Even with all that, I still finished with an average speed of 15.3 mph for a 27 mile ride.<\/p>\n
Looking at the statistics below, I see that I did spend much more time in my heart rate zone 4 than I normally do. And, the time in zones 3-5 represented the vast majority of the ride. We’ll see in 8 weeks how this improves my fitness level.<\/p>\n
The weather conditions were the best I’ve had all year. It was in the upper 50’s, clear skies and only a slight breeze that didn’t affect my riding. I hope this means we’ve turned the corner and winter is in my rear view mirror!<\/p>\n
Todays Stats: (From the Garmin, ODO from my Vetta bike computer)
\nDistance:\u00a0\u00a027.6 \u00a0mi
\nRide Time: 1:48:01
\nAve Speed: 15.3 mph
\nMax Speed:\u00a029.4 mph
\nElevation Gain: 1438
\nElevation Loss: 1404
\nEst. Calories: 1539
\nAve HR : 128 bpm
\nMax HR: 157 bpm<\/p>\n
Z1 (< 103):\u00a04:54 for\u00a0\u00a01.1miles
\nZ2 (< 120):\u00a014:50 for\u00a03.2 1miles
\nZ3 (<137):\u00a045:07\u00a0 for\u00a012.3 miles
\nZ4(<154):\u00a042:20 \u00a0for\u00a011.2 \u00a0miles
\nZ5(<171): 2:13 for 0.4\u00a0miles<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On Tuesday, the exercise coach at Boulder Sports Medicine Center suggested I add some higher intensity workouts into my training mix as he thought that would help me shift my Lactate Threshold graph to the right. By doing so, I would be able to do more intense work while accumulating less blood lactate. So, today […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.starfirefarm.com\/ride\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.starfirefarm.com\/ride\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.starfirefarm.com\/ride\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.starfirefarm.com\/ride\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.starfirefarm.com\/ride\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=426"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.starfirefarm.com\/ride\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":430,"href":"https:\/\/www.starfirefarm.com\/ride\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426\/revisions\/430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.starfirefarm.com\/ride\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.starfirefarm.com\/ride\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.starfirefarm.com\/ride\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}