Marvelous Night for a Moon Run

I am taking a rest day today (Thursday).  I have had a full week of workouts already.  Sunday’s indoor bike ride was not too hard – I did not ride as long as Laura did because I had to change the pedals on my bike because I had it setup so our son could ride it while he was home from college over the holidays.   On Monday morning, I did my tempo run workout.  The streets were clear, and it was right around freezing, but pretty windy.   On Monday evening, we went to Master’s Swim Practice.  This is a good structured workout, but most of the members are former high school and college swimmers who enter meets at the master’s level.  They separate speed by lanes, and I am in the slowest lane.  That is fine, but with 4 people in the lane, we were bumping into each other a lot.  A couple of the members act as coaches, and say on the deck, explaining the workouts.  They have a lot to improve on my stroke, and I get good suggestions.  The swim cross-training in my marathon program calls for about 45-55 minutes of swimming – about 1600 yards.  This workout was 2500 yards, and stretches to 90 minutes.  I am okay with that, but the session starts at 7:30 pm, so we are getting home from the high school between 9:45-10 pm by the time we get showered and dressed.    Our plan is to do this on Mondays and Fridays, but with my first 20 miler on Saturday morning, I am going to pass this Friday.   

On Tuesday night, we started another new venture – CompuTrainer ‘Lab’ workouts.  This is a group indoor bike session in the basement of our friend, Bernie Conway, who is a multiple time Kona qualifier Ironman. ‘140Point6 Computrainer Lab ‘ has 8 CompuTrainers hooked into a common computer network, with large video screens displaying our progress, remote-controlled fans, and  music, lights and TV/video screens.  Bernie designs workouts for a group workout- we have signed up for a six-week session.  Tonight is an FTP test (Functional Threshold Power).  It measures in watts the amount of power you could deliver for 1 hour, at 100% of your effort.  This test approximates  that 1 hour measure by looking for 105% of power for 20 minutes. 

CompuTrainers apply resistance to the rear wheel of the bike to simulate hills based on a computer program.  I bought one from Bernie for Laura 2 Christmases ago, and that is where Laura does her bike workouts, usually following an interval workout, based on an FTP test Bernie did a couple of years ago.  Or, she runs a course profile of an Ironman or Triathlon course, and rides that for 1-2 hours.  Sometimes I will switch my bike onto the CompuTrainer, or adjust the seat on Laura’s bike for a CompuTrainer ride.  But there is some setup and calibration with CompuTrainers, so if I ride on a morning before work, I just hop on my bare-bones fluid trainer and start pedaling.

Bernie must have had our data from 2 years ago, because he gave me a base FTP of 180.  I was surprised, because I rarely hit that in our basement, and I gear my workouts to hot 130-140.  I guess I need to ramp that up.    We had 8 people in the basement, all of them I have met before either in our triathlon club, or master’s swim.  Bernie helped get our bikes on the trainers, and do all the warm-up and calibration of the bikes and equipment necessary to ride.  He had us warm up for 20 minutes, and we tried to keep our watts at 50% of FTP, and the RPM about 85.  The output from our bikes was displayed in front of us on large video screen, with a “dashboard” effect, where if your watts drop below 45%, it shows blue; if you are in the 46-54% sweet spot, it shows green, and if you go above that, it goes from yellow to orange to red.   For further distraction, Bernie showed video of an Ironman race from Louisville.  Bernie has done that, and Laura has gone to Louisville a few times to watch our friends. 

We did some short intervals where we hit 100% of our FTP for a minute at a time, and then we did some recalibration.  Now it was time for the FTP test.  The idea is ride a course with a constant 0.2% - 0.25% grade at 105% of your FTP.   I took a GU, and water, and got ready to wrap my head around this.  When Bernie started the test, there was a tendency to spike your FTP, I did not immediately get above 105%, but when I did, I went WAAAY over for a few seconds.  Pretty soon, I was staying between 100-110% so about 180-200 watts.   I tried to focus on delivering power by applying constant pressure through my foot contacting the pedal, both on the down stroke and the upstroke.   By 5 minutes in, I was dripping with sweat, and wondered how I would keep this up.   After that, I got into a rhythm for a while.  Bernie had switched the Ironman video with one of an “alley cat” bike race in NYC.  So, instead of Olympic caliber athletes riding bikes we would love to have, these were bike messengers and hipsters dodging traffic, and giving cyclists a bad name.   Bernie had told us to keep steady until 5 minutes left, then start maxing out.  So at 10 minutes, I could envision holding that 105-110% for another 5 minutes.  After that, we would see what I had left.  There were a few times when I was getting water and my power meter showed blue when I was in the 95% range; so I focused on keeping my power constant even when I was drinking water or wiping off sweat with a towel.  To get my watts up, I would either have to increase my RPMS, or shift gears, or some combination of both.  I did not want the higher gear right away, so I spun at a higher cadence for about 30-45 seconds, and then when I got in a groove, I shifted to a higher gear.  It felt harder at first, but after 15 minutes, it all felt hard.  I got settled into this newer reality, and with about 3 minutes to go, pushed the pace back, seeing numbers over 120%.  My FTP number was above 190 – I think 192 or 193.  I got into the last couple of minutes, I was grunting every breath. Bernie urged us to ‘fight for that extra watt!’  I was at 194 watts, it would be nice to have a round number like 195 – kind of like getting a 95% on a test. We got to zero seconds, I had hit 195, I geared down, spun out slower, drank water.  Everyone in the room was beat.   I felt exhausted, but was pleased with the outcome.  I never even considered that I might have gotten 200, because that will be the basis for all my workouts the rest of the outseason, and we would not want to make them unrealistically hard based on an aberration.  I need to learn to ride like this outside.  I wore a heart rate monitor, and the few times I looked at it during the FTP test – it was 134 or 138 during the first 15 minutes.  When I cranked it up in the last 5 minutes, it read 148.   The next time I take an FTP test, I will register splits during on the watch, because the watch will show average, and max heart rate for those times.  Then, I can use that HR to approximate the power I should apply during workouts and races.  

Swimming and the FTP test kept Laura and me up late, so I did not wake up early and run yesterday.  Instead, because Laura was working late, I ran after work on Wednesday night.  The temperature was about 20 degrees, and there was a faint wind, so the wind chill was probably 15.   Today’s workout was speed work – 5  x 1000 m.  I thought it would be at 4:07 splits, but my schedule said 4:03.  That sounded right from prior years.   I had a lot of heavy clothes on, but my fingers were a little cold.  I knew even during my warm up that 4:03 per km would be hard to achieve tonight.  I think my first split was 4:15; then I had a 400m rest.  I have 200m spots marked out in a mile loop around my street and the one next to it.  So, I can run a mile with only 4 turns.   By the third interval, my fingers warm, but I was not getting any faster – 4:12 was the best.   I guess my last speed session was on a treadmill, and I have done 2 on the indoor track – I may have done one outside, too.  What is tough with speed work outside in the winter is that you get all lathered up running hard, and then if you jog or walk intervals in between, you can get chilled from being so wet. 

I finished the 5 sets, and I was okay once I got out of the wind.   I think it is possible to do quality speed work in the cold, as long as the ground is dry (which it was), but I may have been fatigued from 3 tough workouts the day prior.    Yeah, let’s go with that.