More QUALITY Trainer Time

If you check some old posts, you'll see me saying this a lot: all winter, I put in a lot of time in the saddle, but it was mostly easy.

I looked back to my training log mid-winter, and I found 8 workouts with some sort of effort over a 3 month stretch. And most of those workouts were intervals of just a few minutes - maybe something like 5x3 minute efforts.

Over these LAST 3 months, I've done around 20 trainer rides with some effort, as well as a handful of fast/hard outdoor rides. And these workouts on the trainer were better: both longer in overall duration, AND with longer intervals. These days, I'm doing more like 9x90 sec efforts, or 3x10 min efforts, or 6x5 min efforts (workouts done in my last few rides). In the last 2.5 weeks, I've put in 8+ hours in the saddle, whereas that was under 5 hours for the same stretch anytime in December of 2020.

I'm THINKING about a late-summer triathlon, but I haven't swam in 17 months, so I need to think a little bit more on that. My goal is to keep the effort up on the trainer so I'd be ready to ride after a crappy crappy swim.