I've been looking forward to getting back on the bike. But since I'm nowhere near 100%, I held back from doing a big FTP effort. Instead, I stuck with just over an hour, with 30 minutes at 85-90% FTP. I've been doing this once a week before, since it's a solid effort. Usually, this is a zone 2-3 type effort. With weak legs and bad lungs, this became a zone 4 effort for much of the ride. My HR spiked early and stayed pinned. Muscularly, this wasn't much harder than usual, and my lungs weren't overly taxed, just my heart rate was a solid 10-15 bpm high than it was at a similar effort before the sickness. Again, this will return in short order once the body gets used to having to do work again. There's still lots of time to set up good racing form. Me and Lightning McQueen will put on a show in a couple of months.
Bike: 65 min, w/ 30 min @ 240w
Run: 2 miles @ 7.2 mph
I'm a big fan of the "steady state training" movement as a substitute for LSD when you just aren't able to put in the hours. I doubt it is as effective as LSD, but 2x20 @ 85% of FTP is sure better than 2 x 22 couch sitting.
ReplyDeleteI did the time trial segment of Flanders yesterday (only about 16km) at what I thought was a good TT pace and I'm pretty wrecked up today. It's not clear I could've lasted 40km at that pace.
Heart rate is a tough one for me to go by, because I find an absolutely huge variation in heart rate versus both power output and RPE. Indoors, even with the fan, my HR is always much higher than outdoors. If I'm a bit dehydrated or tired it's higher. And so forth. I've almost given up using it as a training tool other than "oh crap, 185bpm... no way this pace is sustainable".