With the continued cold weather I was happy to get in a decent trainer ride yesterday. I rode L2 for half an hour then did an hour of tempo with 15-second standing bursts every two minutes. This type of workout is known as the “hour of power” (HOP) in the wattage circles. After the hour, I tagged on some more L2 for a total ride time of 1hr and 40mins with 116 TSS.

After two days of decent, but not killer workouts, I thought I’d try some VO2s today. I kind of feel that my functional threshold power (FTP) is stuck in a rut. It increased fairly quickly at the beginning of this training cycle, but for the last few weeks, I haven’t seen much improvement, despite all the L3/L4 work I’ve been doing. Since I started my training in October with pretty good fitness, I think maybe I’ve reached an early plateau. So I thought it may be good to switch over to some L5 work for the next couple of weeks. Then return to the sweet spot training (SST) and see if I can continue to improve my FTP.

I set out to do a series of 4-minute VO2 intervals, but I only got to 2 and a half before I quit. I managed to hit my target wattage for the first two, but they were really hard. I knew when I started the third one I was in trouble by the way my legs felt. Even with all the willpower, I could muster to ignore the burning in my legs, I just couldn’t do it. Maybe the last few days were harder than the numbers portray. Even after 10 minutes of easy spinning, I tried to do some more tempo and even that felt hard. So today’s ride was only 1hr and a measly 62 TSS. Oh well, I think I’ll take it easy tomorrow and try again on Sunday