Saturday Tempofest...

I was not able to schedule a block of 5 hours to ride on Saturday this week, so I decided to split a total ride goal of 7 hours over the weekend into two equally times rides (3.5 hours each).

I had very, very good legs at the start of Saturday. My general goal thus far during the winter is to get in my key workouts each week (FTP, 5 min intervals, sprints, etc) and get in a long ride each week. The long ride distance is determined by how much work I have done during the week and is set at a distance (actually distance and intensity) that will slightly raise CTL (3-4 points) each week. If I am tired... I go a little shorter or take a day off during the week to rest and stay energized for the next workout. All other rides between the aforementioned are done at tempo pace... or as close as my legs will let me get to that pace. Most people agree that the most aerobic bang for the buck for the recovery cost is achieved at high L3... the sweet spot I mentioned earlier. On good days, I have done intervals where I ride at this power output for 10 minutes or so with a short break between... on really good days, I just ride at the sweet spot for as long as I can.

On Saturday, I had good legs and decided that I would ride sweet spot for my entire 3 hour ride. Did I think I could pull it off? No, but it sounded fun to try. After an hour and a half, I was dead where I wanted to be... NP was at sweet spot and AP was only off by 4 watts (lower, of course). I continued to do this and my legs continued to die a slow, long death. At two hours in, I could not really keep the wattage up without rest and by the end of the ride, I felt like I had been whipped. I was very tired after this ride and was shocked to see that my IF was only 0.83. That is not a shabby effort, but the way I felt, I was surprised to see it that low. Then I checked the AP... it was only 17 watts lower than my normalized. For that type of a ride, I could not find another ride on record with that high of an average power... so, I guess it was pretty good. Today, the legs were fried until I put out a 4 min all out effort and then they opened up and I was able to muster a 0.75 IF ride... pretty please with that I guess.

CTL is at 94.5... highest ever on record...