More...

First up, a funny article on from Slate about whether obesity existed prior to our modern lifestyle. The answer, of course, is NO! Why? Because people used to eat fruits, vegetables, and small amount of meat while leading active lifestyles. The logical conclusion is that those who claim that their genetics, and not their sedentary and cheese-puff munching ways, are responsible for their weight are also claiming by implication that they have significantly evolved (or devolved, as the case may be) from their pre-historic brethren.

Moving on, on Thursday, I did a two hour ride with 40 minutes of lactate threshold-type work, broken up as 8 x 5 minutes at 165 bpm with 3 minutes between sets. Not easy. I would greatly prefer to do this ride outside, but because I simply cannot do a ride like this near my apartment, it's either riding on the trainer or adding an hour and a half of driving (roundtrip) to get to and from Stoney Creek. At least the trainer should build some mental toughness.

Here's a graph of the relavent part of the ride:Goal: by next year, be pushing 350 W for intervals like these.

The power meter is awesome for doing these sorts of efforts. Once I figured out the wattage required to get to 165 bpm, I can try to sit on that as my HR builds instead of killing it for the first minute of the effort to raise the HR then dialing it back a notch to sustain that HR, which is how I used to ride.

Oh, I should also mention I came up with a solution for the inadequacy of average power. (Okay, saying I came up with the solution is giving myself too much credit.) I set my power zones so that I can just look at time spent in each one. This should provide much more meaningful data that average power, which is only relative for steady state rides on the trainer or a nearly flat road.For example, looking at the above bar graph, I can see that I spent over 35 minutes in the "supra max zone". The titles of each zones are set by Saris, and are not accurate for the way I've set up my zones. Instead, all time spent above 270 W goes into "supra max", time between 240 W and 270 W goes into "max", etc. A hard two hour ride would thus have a lot of time in max, and a hard 5 hour ride would probably be split between threshold, race pace, and max. An easier 5 hour ride would be split between endurance, threshold, and race pace, and a recovery ride would be recovery and maybe some endurance.

Yesterday I did 3100 swim. First, I set a new PR for a 50m - 37 seconds. I was still tired from a swim workout earlier this week, and I think I can beat that by a second, maybe two, next time out. The main set of the workout was 2000m straight with splits every 500m. My total time was 33:58, broken down as 8:14, 8:33, 8:38, 8:32. That comes out to 1:41/100m, I think. I was hoping for closer to 1:35. As I went to do the next set, 5 x 100m all out, my calf cramped up after the first 25. I stopped and went back to the wall to start over. As I pushed off, my foot cramped. I could feel that other muscles in my legs were close to cramping too, so I bagged the swim.

I added almost 10 minutes onto my super easy run to make up for (to the extent that that is possible) my lost swim time. And, I biked to work for the first time on National Bike to Work Day. Including coming home for lunch, that's a free 30 minutes of training...if you can call riding a cruiser bike at 12 mph training.

Anyhow, now it's off to do a mega secret training session.