Over the weekend it got much colder so I was back to riding indoors. Saturday and Sunday I just did a couple hour-long tempo rides with Heather while we watched Season 2 of Lost. Today I got a late start to my ride because I was wrapped up with some enhancements to my Excel-based training diary. I’ve updated my interval charts to display ride summary information. I also added an “info-panel” to my training load chart, showing the current day’s details.

Back to my ride…I wanted to do a hard ride so I set out to do 6x5min VO2 intervals. Since my last few attempts at these failed, I targeted the lower end of my L5 range so I could complete all six of them. I did the first three on the trainer and they actually weren’t that bad?! My legs didn’t start to burn until the third one. Since I was getting toasty riding in the living room, I switched to the rollers in the garage for the last three. Although it was nice and cool, the intervals continued to feel progressively more difficult. I did manage to keep my wattage up, so it was just a matter of mind over pain! For the last one, I kicked it up to 380 watts for the last minute “blowing out the pipes” so to speak.

Though the average wattage for those VO2s were lower than what I’d see when I am in “race” shape, I was happy with the workout. I need to remind myself that VO2max power can increase independently from FTP, so I shouldn’t expect to crank out the same numbers as I do in the summer, even if my FTP was the same. Though my last few rides were fairly short, I’ll be taking tomorrow easy. I want to play it safe after the little rut I was in.