Day 207

I didn't have much time between school and work for a ride, and didn't even have time to post this until the next day.  Yesterday I went to try and find a starting point for some interval training.  I'm planning to include about 1-2 days of intervals per week from now until I leave for France.  My main focus is still on long, slow rides, since that's what I'll be doing in France, but I'd also like to be a little stronger on the bike in general, and I believe this is necessary.  Some of the intervals will be long ones, in the 20-30min range, while others will be as short as 3min.  I don't think I'll work on any shorter than 3min until after I get back from France.  For now the trick is finding an ideal power to start with for these intervals.  It's a lot like going to the gym for the first time in a while and trying to figure out what you can lift.  As you can see from the attached file, I went out and tried to keep my power around 400W for the first interval, then around 350W for the second, and 300W for the third (which is all time permitted).  Actually, I had it in my head that I'd do 400W each time, until I kept coming up short!  In any case, it's sort of inevitable that you miss the mark to begin with, then eventually you fine tune it so that you can add a few watts per week to what you managed the week before, just like you would in the gym.  So I'm hoping that something in the ballpark of 5x3min at 300W will be a good place to start. 

Overall, my ride was 21.79km in 51:03, for an avg speed of 25.7km/h and power was 156W (222W normalized).  Here we can also see a good case for paying attention to normalized power.  From the 156W, one would expect the ride to have been pretty tame and mellow, but in relation to the normalized power it becomes apparent that the were some shorter, harder efforts within that overall average.  My legs were smoked by the end of it, and it sure felt more like 222W for 50min than 156W (which would be more like a short recovery ride for me).