Tonight was the debut of a new Spinervals workout. Unlike my plans to do two or three consecutive weeks of a specific workout, this one gets tossed in every 3-4 weeks as a benchmark. It's one of the newer DVDs, Spinervals 27.0, Threshold Test and Sufferfest. That's a pretty intimidating name, eh?
It's a one hour workout, in essentially three parts: warm-up and pre-fatigue, main set, finisher and cooldown. The warm-up is the usual, 3x30s hard, followed by a hard 3 minute effort, and three hard 1 minute efforts. All this is to get the blood flowing and dull the legs just a little. Then it's time for the main set/threshold test: 20 minutes, hard as you can for the duration. Whether you're doing this to music in the basement, or with a coach talking you through, or under any other circumstances, it's hard. Simply put, you settle in, and hope you guessed right. I did pretty good, hitting a power range between 315w and 320w. I wasn't going to pull much more than that. In the last minute, I was able to push up to just shy of 350w, but that was burning the remainder of the gas in the tank. I was fully spent. The workout ends with a quick run of 3x20s, on a choice gear, keep it light if you want to work cadence, go big if you want to work sprints/power. (I went to 53x12 for sprints.)
If I'm going to regularly test my fitness outside of races (which are too inconsistent anyways), this is a fine way to do it. It's not quite the Allen/Coggan protocol, but at least it would be similar conditions every time out. Now I have a baseline for the rest of the summer, and will expect the numbers to go up from here.
Bike: Spinervals 27.0 - Threshold Test and Sufferfest, 60 minutes (Test: 317.2w average)
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