Power Mentor Group with Shane & Marc - Closed. (Page 47)

I'm doing Week 6, VO2 - 1 on Thursday -- let me know what I should target and I'll go for it.  Honestly, I tend to think there's a HUGE mental component to this.  Of course, who knows how well my 5' and 20' tests estimated my CP and W', or if improvements have been made since then.  I'd be curious what it feels like to truly run my battery out and see if I could mentally force my way through it.  

Kind of nervous about tomorrow's threshold ride.  All of the threshold rides so far have gone well, but tomorrow's makes me nervous for some reason!

Had a sick daughter 2 days last week that threw my training behind, and we went skiing Saturday throwing me another day off.  I completed Sweet Spot Week 5 this morning.  Didn't realize it was 1:45 and I had to cut off the last minutes of the workout to get ready for work.

Totals are as follows:

VO2 Max: TSS 70, NP 148

THR-1: TSS 101, NP 158

SWEET: TSS 126, NP 147

Despite some malfunctions with GC, I managed to finish week 6 V02-1 tonight.

I had to pause it briefly after the initial 5' @ 98% segment but GC stopped registering power when it started up again. I tried to start over, but couldn't figure how to jump ahead in the workout.  So I quickly created a new workout for the rest of the session and here it is as 2 separate .tcx files.

Total TSS of 70.

Marc - still wrapping my head around the W' concept. I didn't feel exhausted after the 5th VO2 session, but it was a pretty tough workout.

Not feeling too optimistic about VO2-2 on Thursday.  My 5 minute power averaged at 246 watts or about 107% of my CP, so V02-2 is going to be pretty close to doing the 5 min test four times in a row.  Probably going to push me over the W' limit.

Oops, that might have been me...  

The W' topic has been very interesting to me.  I've been using the dev build of GC that includes the W' metric and it seems to be reasonable for me except for when I do the short 5 x 10s all out intervals in a warmup.  I go negative on the W' by quite a bit every time.

I've been running it on two PCs with the data synced between them using Google Drive.  I had one issue where it kept crashing on launch and I had to delete the index folder to force a statistics refresh but other than that I've had no trouble at all.

If you do go negative W' in a ride, GC will tell you what your minimum CP would have to be set to in order to keep W' above zero.  For my ride this morning it said min CP was 403w.  I can only dream.    I suspect my W' is set to low (at 17Kj) but that's what the calculator told me based on my 5' and 20' tests.

I think I was right to be nervous about this ride....though, I do wonder if knowing the ride going in and being nervous about it caused me to be more mentally okay with not doing as well as I could/should have??

The 5 x 4' intervals were all fine -- I was a few watts above targets for each (each interval was stronger than the previous one).  But when it came to the 15' interval, I just could not get my legs going.  It started quite low and built throughout, finishing at an average power of 93% instead of the targeted 95%.  Kind of disappointing....I suspect it was more mental than physical, but at the time, it sure felt like I couldn't get my legs to turn over.  Oh well, guess they can't all be great workouts, right?

A powerplay goal would suck - 6 min VO2!

This sounds like fun, and so much better/healthier than the ol' college days where shots were the selected punishment. :-)  I don't watch much TV, but I did see the Canadians were doing fairly good in the medal count.  I thought I heard the radio guy say that the US has moved up to 4th for medal count.  You Canadians have the upper hand at cold weather stuff. :-D

I did ski this past weekend and pretended I was in the Olympics.  I won gold.

I did wk4 Thrs1 last night.  Had weird ride, after the 30' intervals and into 1st interval I was not feeling well and was struggling.  Did a spindown check at the end of the interval to make sure it wasn't trainer/bike related.  During the recovery interval I realized that I did not have enough to eat during the day.  I didn't have my normal breakfast (breakfast bar only) as I rushed to get daughter to AM track practice which and also forgot my fruits in my lunch (sandwich and yogurt only).  Work was non-stop and I didn't have any dinner before riding.  I took a quick break and ate a banana and slice of bread with peanut butter.  About halfway through the 2nd interval, wallah, the energy returned and I was able to finish out the ride.  Lesson learned, these rides are tough enough! 

TSS was 87.

I thought a lot about why that 15' interval was so hard for me as I was writing in my training log this morning, and I think I may have figured something out.  For my 101% intervals, I was in one gear harder, holding a cadence of 89 - 90.  If I'd stayed in that gear for the 95% interval, my cadence would have been in the low 80's, which isn't within my preferred range....so I dropped down to one gear easier, which required a cadence of 96 - 97 if I wanted to hold the prescribed power.

Needless to say, my legs just weren't up to spinning that fast.  I can post my .tcx file and/or a screen shot when I get home tonight, but my power built throughout the entire 15' interval.  By the end, my legs were spinning fine and my HR was 10 bpm lower than LTHR (8 bpm lower than where it had been on the last 101% interval), so relatively comfortable.  I think my legs were just in shock and rebelling!  At least that's my hope

Now that I know this about myself, here's to hoping I have good gearing for St. George.  I have limited opportunities to train on hills between now and then, but I suspect I won't be able to maintain a comfortable cadence of 95 throughout the entire race, so I've gotta learn to deal with it!

Um...yeah...I think I'll just ride outside instead.