Two Wheel Blogs

Good for me. I got one right. I'm sitting here looking out the window at a dark, cold and rainy afternoon. I wouldn't want to train hard in this crap. I don't even want to go out and get the mail.

My log will show Recovery today. A Recovery ride was just the perfect sauce for the dish the weather man served up today, and after the las couple of day's workouts. The thing about recovery is, I can do recovery anywhere, even on my trainer.

And that's what I did. And today, for once, I got it right, too. I'm probably among the world's worst for doing recovery. I mean well. I plan it right. It's the execution of the plan. That's my downfall. I think I have it figured out though.

I think I figured out today where my recovery rides go wrong. They always start out on the right track, mostly because on recovery days my legs are heavy and dead. But lots of times, OK most of the time, my recovery rides end up about half recovery and half endurance/tempo. I start out in the recovery and end up near threshold. Why? Because somewhere about 30 or so minutes in everything starts to loosen up and feel good again.

My legs feel like they're done recovering and like they're ready to do some work. Without much thought to keeping the watts down in the Recovery level, they'll start working all on their own. Before I know it, I'm tired and in need of another recovery ride. Sound familiar?

Today I realized what was happening when I watched my wattages climbing. Perceived effort had been dropping, so my legs had started working harder. I throttled it back. Then I tried an experiment. I wanted to know if my legs really were recovered or if they were only feeling that way. I put it in the big ring and started cranking. I wanted to see what Threshold Power would feel like. My suspicions were confirmed. I could easily tell after only a few seconds at FTP these legs only thought they were battle ready.

Back to the small ring and a nice leisurely cool down. A few minutes later I got off my bike. My legs felt pumped but not spent, like they could do more. I told them to channel all that good feeling and motivation into rebuilding. I told them to get themselves right, then we'll see about doing some real work.

The video? Students from my alma mater get to have lots more fun today than when I went there [a lot of] years ago. In the video, Jerrod Bouchard is about to overtake another team's HPV as he just misses the HPV speed record. It turns out Jerrod and I have something in common - majoring in the same subjects at the same school. He's a lot faster on his bike than I am on mine though.