Tuesday I met up with one of my H.S. MTB athletes - well, I actually met up with the other 2 as well, but they went MTB'ing - and we headed out to do the legendary "Sweet Spot" or "Hour of Power" ride...60m at ~90% FTP. I figure my FTP is probably around 300W right now (maybe a bit lower), so I set out to do 270W, figuring that was going to be a stretch after not-a-lot-of-riding the past couple of weeks (months, years)...and figuring that Malcolm might not be ready to go full gas since this was his first time doing the workout. I use a sweet little loop by my house:
View Sweet Spot Loop in a larger map
It takes about 22-25 minutes to do a lap, making it the perfect loop for this workout. You do have to wait - or blow - one stoplight, but that's not too bad for an urban area like this.
Anyway, off we went and I quickly found that 270 was pretty easy - in fact I could hold near 300W without too much strain or heart rate drift. I even kept the "sprint-every-3-minutes" component because it wasn't that bad. Malcolm did a good job of sitting on my wheel (he's about 140 lbs to my 173 lbs - so in the draft he had it "easy").
Here's the quick version: 48 minutes of Sweet Spot, 12 minutes of Groveling!
Things were going great into the third lap when I gapped off Malcom just before the turn around, roughly 45 minutes into the ride, and was feeilng pretty good. My average was down to 295 but I thought I might be able to pick it up again if I tried...
then the wheels came off over the small hill on Arastradero - couldn't hold the power, couldn't really pedal very well...and over the next 12 minutes of nearly focused effort I lost about 12W of my average!. Here is the Strava for the ride: Roughly 20.5 miles in the hour...but still need the power download (F*%&king Powertap Cradle!)
Day 3 was NO RIDE b/c I wasted too much time on my job today instead of riding - oh yea, and I ate a McDonalds out of depression...I suck. Back at it tomorrow...
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