6h Solo Best Personal – Day 3 – CP Intervals

[victoriamq]

Hi

 

This questions refers to the 12×30 seconds at max effort followed by 4.5 minutes.

A few questions,

how do you measure progress? I am 'guessing' you do them a the same gear (highest gear for me in my road bike on a trainer) would HR be enough? what other ways? Perceived effort?

[Lynda]

The best way to gauge progress is to use normalized power for the intervals duration. Without a power meter the next best measure is distance completed on a repeatable course. These intervals are too short in duration for heart rate to be a useful measure due to the lag in response time. Perceived effort and perceived exertion should remain constant.

Lynda

[robcip]

My advice, if I may:

a) By all means, do them on a trainer. If I tried them w/o a trainer, it'd be 30s max, crash, lay on ground for 4 1/2 min. Personally, I think the tallest gear on a ride bike is too much, but I always start from a dead stop for the sake of consistency, and am spinning 120+ about the time my legs are ready to explode.

b) In the absence of a some sort of power readout, get yourself a rear wheel speedometer. Assuming it reads avg speed, and max speed, I think you'll find recording these numbers for each repeat to be very valuable over the course of the interval, over the course of the workout, and between workouts. Watching your avg fluctuate during the course of each interval will help you pace yourself properly. Same with minimizing the std deviation of avg and max over the course of the workout. You can either use the lap function, or come to a complete stop, and reset your computer at the beginning of each repeat. The biggest difference between your speedo and a watt-based computer in this instance is that the latter would be spiking while you were accelerating, but after you reach avg speed and start hanging on for dear life (10s?), not much. I record watts, and the std dev for my avg power over the course of a good workout is 2-3%, and 5-6% for max, and my last workout my avg power over the workout was 6.7% higher than my previous best a month ago. That kind of info will keep you motivated to do this grueling workout.

c) These are super-bonk-inducing workouts. Do not start under-fueled, or neglect max fuel intake during the workout. I have started these workouts feeling fine after a few repeats, and then felt like I was going to pass out after a few more.

[Author]

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