America's #1 Balance Bike Destination

America's #1 Balance Bike Destination
America's #1 Balance Bike Destination

Sunday, January 16, 2011

3 hour road ride..

..Or equivalent. Lately I am leaning more toward the benefits of riding indoors for longer durations. For one, it's just plain safer. It also takes a lot less time to get ready and dressed. Typical winter road ride includes frequent stops- to meet up, to pee, to eat, to fix flats.. It is never a contiguous 3 hours of pedaling. Since you're usually in a group, you're also not working very hard, if at all, 80-90 percent of the time. You end up doing a lot of coasting- sometimes because of downhills, sometimes because you're in the paceline and the pace is slow.
Here's a solution: get on the trainer, spin 100+ rpm for 2 hours straight, never stop pedaling. Today I pegged my heartrate in the 165-175, kept the watts in the 175-195 range and felt pretty torched at the end. A 3 hour road ride would have been more enjoyable for sure, but much less efficient. I guess I'll be mixing it up a bit this winter. Doing 3 hours solo on the road is torture, and sometimes it forces you to work too hard because you need to keep warm!
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2 comments:

Unknown said...

ride the fixed gear and pull the group the whole time. solves that problem of coasting an dnot working hard

IMA said...

Todd it's not a problem per se.. just an observation.. but sometimes I need to squeeze more training stress per minute out of a workout or else fall short of my workout goal or, I will have to keep going for 1-2 extra hours, which is why I try to ride down to meet the group, which is hard because it's so damn cold at 7:00 am! To be honest, I always catch hell for being gone until 12:00 noon on weekends and end up being wife's personal slave for the rest of the day as punishment.