After my hard 3-day training block earlier this week, I took it fairly easy until the weekend. Since it rained Saturday, I ended up doing some threshold intervals on the rollers. I was excited to see what I could do after a couple days of rest. First I did a 5-minute warm-up interval at threshold. That didn’t feel too bad so I decided to test my 20-minute power. I started the effort below threshold and kept it at or near threshold for the first ten minutes. Then I picked it up for the second half. It felt unusually hard—much harder than it felt when pushing the same wattages on Monday. I kicked it up for the last minute but I still wasn’t able to break the wattage I achieved three weeks ago. Oh well, the consolation prize was that I did break my 12-minute best for the year. I finished my workout with a 15-minute interval in which I go above threshold at the beginning and the end, and sink below during the middle. It was tough! BTW, the reason there’s no HR data in the chart is that my HR battery was dying, although during the last interval, I thought I was dying!
On Sunday, I went outside for a short but intense ride. It was cold and there was a strong wind from the east so I headed east for a dump loop—I like coming back with tailwinds! I pushed it on the way out and on the hills on Cartwright Rd. Since I had already decided that I would take the next few days easy, I threw in some anaerobic efforts. I tried for 1-minute and 30-second bests. I did manage to get a good 30-second number, but the 1-minute efforts weren’t anything to write home about. After that, I rode home at a tempo pace on Hill Rd with an awesome tailwind!
I also took a look closer look at my Performance Management Chart (PMC). I came to the conclusion that, despite last week’s “recovery” week, that I still needed to back off a bit. Since I was only basing my recovery on volume, and not TSS, doing lower volume with the same high intensity didn’t really decrease my training load. It did put a little notch in my chronic training load (CTL) ramp, but my training stress balance (TSB) has been negative for over a month! So now my plan is to take this next week really easy until I get my TSB positive again. We’ll see how it goes, but I think I may throw out my weekly hours projections and just use the PMC to periodize.