CompuTrainer Class: Muscular Endurance III and Cool Springs Long Route

I rode 3 hours today, which didn't leave time for much else besides work. But they were a good 3 hours, two different rides. The first was at Todd's, 1:40 on the CompuTrainers with Parri, Anna, and Val. The second was outside, 1:20 with the Harpeth Bike Club. The afternoon ride was actually pretty rough--my legs were definitely tired from the hard morning workout! But it was a good kind of tired because I knew I'd worked hard, and it wasn't unbearable, because even though I didn't end up with the lead group, I didn't ride alone in no-man's land, either.

Today's workout was a surprise. I'd expected at least 4 threshold efforts, similar to last week's workouts. Instead, we did five 1-min high-cadence efforts, 1 tempo effort (25 min), 2 threshold efforts (10 min each), and a sprint (to 666 watts).

Red line: wall
Orange line: sprint

My muscles were pretty tight all morning and even tighter in the evening. In the morning, I hit a wall a 9 minutes in to the first 10-minute threshold effort. I gutted out the last minute and the first 3 of the next effort, but then I dropped the watts a ton. I slowly amped back up (increasing every minute), but that was not a pleasant wall!

When we race omniums, we will race twice a day on at least one day of the weekend, so I wanted to see how I'd handle another ride. Besides that every pedal stroke was a lot more effort than it usually is, the ride went well. Basically, I was in the hang-on-or-you'll-die-by-yourself mode and really just hung on. I did not ride to Healthways to warm up (it's not staying light quite late enough), so today's was only the CS route with no additional mileage:

1:16:00 total
8:30 rollout (red)
1:07:00 main ride
0:30 cooldown