Back to Training

It's been a long while since my last post.  During the last couple of months I took somewhat of a break from cycling.  I kept riding, but only about 4 days a week, mostly SST, with some weight lifting, and tennis thrown in for some cross-training.  For a mental break, I just let cycling take a back seat for a while.  I rode when it was convenient and didn't think about cycling as much.  I rarely rode more than 1.5 hours at a time, and my longest ride since Thanksgiving was 2.5 hours. 

About 3 1/2 weeks ago I ramped up the training some by adding even more SST, and throwing in some sprints and occasional 30 second intervals in level 6. 

Today I had the opportunity to get out in the awesome weather, and my legs were feeling good.  This was my first ride at over 50 degrees in many weeks.  I was going to do a long 90% FTP interval, but I decided during the warm-up to do a 20 minute test instead.  I've been wanting to do that but haven't been motivated to try it at 35 degrees or indoors.  Really I was looking at this as a pre-test, since I'm in the very early stages of my training, but once I got going I felt good and put out a much better effort than I expected.  I rode the first 10 minutes at 337 watts, and wasn't feeling all that bad, so I ramped up the pace and got the average all the way up to 343 by the 20 minute mark. 

It's really amazing the affect that sub-threshold training seems to have.  Even though I've been training in the 280 to 290 watt range mostly, I was a able to knock out 20 minutes over 50 watts above that today.