Two Wheel Blogs

How on earth do you ride tempo anyway? According to what I understand tempo is harder than endurance, which is harder than recovery. But tempo is not as hard as threshold. My problem is I'm always wanting to push it a little harder. When I'm riding a threshold workout this works out just fine because threshold ends a little over FT wattage. Basically that means any wattage above threshold can't be held for more than an hour. Holding FT for an hour hurts really badly. So riding threshold is easy, just ride at a wattage level that hurts anywhere from a little to quite a bit.

I can ride at the lower end of the threshold range all day. We all can. Well, we all can until fatigue sets in. For me at least it might as well be all day because I don't have all day to ride.

Anyway, you can see where I get into trouble with tempo. It's less painful than a little pain and more than none at all. On the old hospital pain scale that goes from one to ten I'm just not all that good at telling the difference between one and three or four. Do you care? Right. Let's move on.

I thought my workout was going to get rained on today. The sky was clear and sunny when I started out but also excessively hot and humid. Before long the wind started whipping up dark clouds. Later on the sky was quite a bit darker than shown here. One of these days I'll pay for bringing along a digital camera on my training rides.

It was good to see there were lots of other riders out on the roads today. I stopped to ask a family - father, mother and teenage son - if they needed help. They'd pulled off the side of the road right at the top of a hill. No help needed, just recovering from the climb. It was the mom who declared the impromptu rest stop. She was also quick to point out that the choice of routes to take was hers. Way to go, mom!

Average speed today was right exactly on 33kph. That's this much in miles per hour. With just over an additional 110 TSS in my legs today my ATL's far in excess of my CTL. Translation: I'm beat.

Tomorrow will be a good day for a recovery ride.