After a few days of wonderful weather, the temperatures had turned to the cooler side and there was some threat of rain.  So this morning we decided to go for a run instead of bike.  The original plan was to go 6 miles, but after 4 miles into the run, Anne thought she might want to do 8, so that is what we did.  I still felt like I needed some more exercise.  Since the weather was now a bit warmer and no rain yet, it sounded like a good chance to do my interval training.

When I would train for marathons, I liked to do weekly speed work, either a tempo run or intervals.  While I might do quarter mile repeats when getting ready for a 10K distance race, for the marathon I found mile repeats worked well for me.  I could only do about 4 of them, since that meant 4 miles running well over my lactate threshold.

For cycling I patterned a similar workout.  Since it took me about 6:45 to 7:00 minutes to run the mile repeats, I duplicated that with 7 minutes flat out on the bike, followed by an easy 4 minutes.  I choose a relatively flat course that included a couple miles of warm-up from our house and then a straight shot, with no need for stop signs or traffic lights during each of the 7 minute intervals.  The blue sections on the map are the intervals done at speed and the red sections the recovery portions.  From the map it would as if I could fit in a 5th interval at the end, but there are too many stop lights and I am way too tired to try a 5th one.  It seems as if all I can do is ride the 4.5 miles back home.

You can see the four intervals, followed by the recovery period from this heart rate curve.  I tried to get into Zone 5 on each interval (for myself that means 167 bpm or higher), sometime I was able to do except for the 4th interval where the 8 mile run and the prior 3 intervals were finally taking their toll.  At some point your legs and can’t push the heart as much as the heart can deliver.   I have my Garmin Edge 500 setup to show the heart rate zone I am in, which works well for this type of workout.

Using a circular course allows me to average the 4 segments so as to somewhat cancel the effect of the wind.  This allows a comparison between different dates.  I have kept this table at the bottom to show those.  With the 8 mile run before, I was not able to quite do the same average speed.  There was also a strong headwind on some sections, a penalty you never quite get back on the other sections.   Since this is for training, the actual speed is not as important as getting my heart rate up sufficient to exceed my lactate threshold, with a short recovery and then a repeat.  This is the best way to improve one’s lactate threshold.

Categories: Speed Workout
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It seems like months since I have been on a mountain bike so I was glad when the weekly MTB rides at Harvey Bear Ranch started up again.  HBR is close by and easy to get to and the trails, although somewhat steep in places, are not that difficult.

About 6 of the “Nightriders” showed up for the ride.  It was great weather, even though we are still in March.

I took my new Garmin Edge 500 on the ride and was able to later download the data and get a map of where I went.  I had to cut the ride short today because it was my birthday and we were going out to dinner.

I uploaded the data file to a website called Strava.  You can see all the details here.  It lets you name some of the climbs you discover with the Garmin GPS.  I needed to figure out the name of the major climb we did, so I found this map of Harvey Bear Ranch and saw the name was Harvey Bear Trail.  Click the image below to download the full Harvey Bear Ranch map.

Here is a short video I took.

Categories: Mountain Biking
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