Love/Hate relationships!

You're probably scared to read this one!

Not to worry.

I have firmly established my love/hate relationship with computers. I've had the second computer crash in 4 months. Luckily, I was able to gather all of my data before formatting the drives and beginning the rebuilding process. It takes so long to get things up and running again. I lost most of the weekend while I reloaded all of the programs etc.

On the training front, things are continuing to go very well. I haven't returned to the cp20 workouts since last week. I had the opportunity to ride at a decent hour this morning. So, I opted out of training last night. We had an easy talking pace ride(except for the hills). I did 1 minute intervals +/- all the way home. Without a power meter, there's now way of telling how hard I was working. It was nice to work on something new since I haven't worked on short intervals in a long time.

Short intervals are my next training addition.
Here's the protocol: Determine your maximum power on a Conconi Test. This is a graduated power test that steps up the wattage by 10 watts every minute. Basically, you go as long as you can. When you can't go any longer, you are done(simply said).
Then you run a second test that determines how long you can ride at that maximum power.
Workouts are determined by creating intervals for various times at various percentages of your Maximum Conconi Power.

When you work at these intensities, you have to consider rest as a part of training. If you lifted weights, you would never consider taxing the same muscles every day. You have to give the body time to recover. As intensity goes up, rest goes up and duration goes down.

Just as I like the critical power time zones for training longer durations, I like this format for shorter, high intensity work.