Endurance Workout

Just completed an endurance workout and thought I'd review it since it covers a lot of training points. There are quite a lot, which might seem a bit like overkill, but in practice I don't stress over most of the stuff here, most has become habit and adds very little in terms of time needed over and above that needed for the cycling itself.

Objectives: I'm a believer in making a effort to get as much out of workouts as possible, over and above the basic ones of improving fitness and, hopefully, enjoying the exercise. 

This applies double to endurance workouts which, by their nature, can be a long old slog.I find having a number of things to think about helps complete them.

So this workout I had the following aims:

• Develop endurance using result from recent tests to set zones.
• Measure current state of endurance fitness
• Gather some baseline data for later simulations of long distance TTs
• Work towards a self test for measuring glycogen levels
• Monitor fluid levels needed 
• Increase cadence, get out of 7x rpm comfort zone and see what 80+ rpm feels like
• Burn lots of calories
• Listen to some old favourites (via Spotify)

Workout The workout was just a bit short of 4 hours and was done on my turbo. This may sound a bit tough but I much prefer to going out on the roads at this time of the year. It consists of 3 "hills" each an hour long going from start of endurance zone to just nudge lactate threshold then a final 45 minutes of a couple of shorter "hills".

I had a breakfast bowl of porridge an hour or so before starting but only ate couple of tangerines during the workout itself.

Results Power data is below 

There are a number of points most of which I was very happy with.

• Average power was just short of 200W with a slight negative split which is pretty smack middle of my endurance zone
• Average HR was nice and low at only 128bpm with a max of 145 near the end
• HR tracked power very closely with very little drift, only 3.4%
• Cadence was on target an average of 84rpm. This actually felt very comfortable and probably felt easier than previous efforts in the 70s.
• Ride felt comfortable up to the very close to end, final "hill" felt a bit tough.
• kJ was 2600, breaking this down (using data from test a couple of weeks ago) I'd guesstimate I burned around 2400kcal made up of roughly 90g of fat and 400g of carbs. This may explain the tough end as I was probably running my glycogen levels quite low and my body was warning me of this
• I drank 4.25l of water. I weighed around 500g less at the start of the ride compared to the beginning so this amount of water was probably just about spot on.  
• I reminded myself just what a great band Black Label Society are.

 Future plans I'll extend this workout to around 4 hours then up the power bit by bit (by increasing the "valleys") to move average power up towards my lactate threshold level of 225W. This will provide useful info for a 12 as this will be my target wattage for that ride. 

I'll then push it further with the aim of hitting an average of 240-250W which is top of my endurance zone and the power I'll need to improve my 100 time. 

At some point I expect my HR drift will increase to past 5% which is a fair indicator of when I am straying out of my pure endurance zone. It will be interesting to see how this then changes, in theory if I get fitter it should come down.

I'll continue to do the workouts on no food and at some point I guess I will  bonk. This won't be much fun but should give me some steer on my glycogen levels. Once I've hit this I'll start to eat just to check if this sorts things out and to give some indication of what level of feeding will be needed on "real" rides.

Cadence felt good at 80rpm+, so I'll make that a goal for all future rides of this nature.