Fartleking Away

My smorgesbord approach to training continued well last night. Following my hardish ride Sunday I still felt good so thought I would do some roller work.

This ended badly last time I tried it as I could not seem to keep going and struggled to do much over 220W, not helped by the fact I was finding it hard to keep on rollers.

I attempted to fix the latter by moving front roller forward one notch and that seemed to do the trick, I felt a lot less wobblier.

I started my session with view to doing better than last time, which would not be too difficult, and maintaining 235W plus. To help I set some session rules:

• I would warm up properly in middle ring, middle rear cog


• I would keep cadence between 80-95rpm


• I would watch the watts average. Following the warmup I would increase cadence so it started to go up gradually. Each time it crossed a 10W step I would up a rear gear then move to big ring and continue


• Once I got to 170bpm (so round about my LT) I would ease off cadence and then maintain a range 162-170bpm


• I would stop at 800KJ.

The results were very pleasing. The session was hard but not at all a killer and I progressed nicely the average watts eventually moving up to 260 over the 50 minutes or so it took to do the 800kj of effort. As a whole I think the session was a sort of fartlek, with me playing around with pace and power in the higher aerobic zone.

I was not monitoring my actual watts during the session and was surprised when I downloaded to see that for 40 minutes I was averaging 280W which should be my FTP with peaks over 300W. Think this plus the MAP test I did last week means I should up my FTP a bit. Will adjust to 290W from now on, which means my sweetspot zone will be 245W-275W.