Another Two

Yesterday I did the 90-minute class, but not all out.  I did all the intervals, but instead of doing them in low zone 4, I was firmly in zone 1.  Oh, I did all the cadence stuff, but having gone hard in a nearly identical class the day before, trying to do it again would have been detrimental on so many levels.  Before the class, Kate, who was substitute teaching said it was her favorite workout and I replied that I didn't share her enthusiasm.  She promised to teach it differently, but I told her that it was my recovery day and promised that I'd be loafing.  I meant to loaf harder and ride easier than I did.  It turned out an important difference was that she had the class riding hard in high zone 3-low zone 4, while the previous day we did it in high zone 4 -- a significant difference.

I went into Alex's 60-minute class today thinking I'd take it easy today and go hard in a long class tomorrow.  Today's workout (tomorrow's too) would consist of a build up to low zone 5 during the warm-up, then 12 30-second rides in zone 5 broken into three sets of four.  The first set with 2-minute breaks between zone 5 sojourns, the second set had 1-minute breaks, and the third set had 30-second breaks.  The breaks were as restful as possible in contrast to Monday's class, when we "rested" in low zone 2, which was pretty hard to maintain by the end of the class.  I started out conservatively, doing zone 5 intervals at 260 watts, the very bottom of my zone 5.  I did the last interval of the second set at 300 watts and it felt OK.  Hard, but OK.  So, I decided to start the fourth set at 295 watts and go up if I felt good.  I did the second interval at 315, third at 330 and started the fourth at 350.  Midway through the fourth, I dialed it up to 400 and that was reasonably tolerable.  At the end my RPE was 8.5-9.  As on Monday, these intervals were OK because we did them at 100-120 rpm.  Had we pedaled slower, I think it would have hurt more.  After the class, I felt reasonably fresh.  So fresh that I'm kicking around doing tomorrow's class hard also.  Maybe not; we'll see.

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