It’s been unseasonably warm lately but with the warmth came a lot of rain. But today the rain stopped and the skies cleared so I was able to get out and get in a good ride. Though it was above 40°F when I left the house, there was a strong, gusty wind that kept it feeling cold most of the ride. The wind was out of the west at 15MPH with gusts in the 20’s! The plan was to do a few “short” lactate threshold (LT) intervals. I was tired of trying VO2s, only to quit, so I figured I’d tackle them another way. Start with shorter LT efforts then increase the wattage over time and get to VO2 level.

I headed west on Beacon and started my intervals immediately. The strong headwind helped me keep the wattage up, but due to the gusty conditions, the wattage would fluctuate a good amount so it was hard to gauge where I was at during the interval. The first interval didn’t feel too bad; my legs weren’t burning like they had been and it felt more like my lungs were the limiter. My wattage wasn’t too bad for the first one either, so I kept plugging away as I headed west then north on Hwy 16.

I turned onto Chaparral and headed west again. After each interval, I’d review my average power and I noticed that I was doing fairly well, all of them were above FTP and increasing! So the last one I decided to try to make it a VO2. There was a hill coming up so I wanted to finish it at the top, which made the interval a little longer than the others. I pushed the whole interval and cranked it up the hill and got an average power of 343 for a 7:29 interval! I was happy with that and considered myself done with that portion of the ride.

After a few minutes of rest, I started doing tempo for the rest of the ride. I was aiming for 45 minutes. I headed west on Purple Sage, back into that strong headwind. I jogged over to Galloway then headed down to Middleton via Emmett Rd. I was really looking forward to making the left on State St so I could have a tailwind. When I finally did, the wind was awesome and I just hammered all the way to Eagle!

For the last half hour, I was cruising at around 28MPH while staying in Level 3/Tempo. It was like free motor-pacing!? Well, almost free, I had to pay for it on the way out. Since I realized I had enough road to do an hour of tempo before reaching Eagle, I bumped up my goal to 1 hour of tempo. I finished that hour just before the turn onto Old State St, with an average of 272 watts…just below my Level 4 border. Not bad! Then I just took it easy for the couple miles remaining to my house. It was my first good ride in a few weeks and I hope is a sign that I’m getting out of this rut. Total ride time was 2hrs 19mins with 182 TSS and 246/271 Ave/Norm power.