Big Bike Trainer Week!

Over the past year or so, most weeks have had 2-3 trainer riders - earlier in 2021, 2 rides was more common, and that bumped up to 3 as the year went along. In April of 2021, I had 3 back-to-back-to-back weeks of 4 hours even, 3 hrs 57 mins, and 4 hrs 5 mins, which was great. Usually, 4 hours (or 3 rides of 80 minutes each) was a solid week. I've only been a few minutes over 4 hours of weekly trainer time 3 times over the past year.

Last week, I felt an extra surge on the bike as I did 4 hrs 32 mins, with ALL of them being longer than my "usual" nice rides of 80 minutes. Here's what it looked like (with trainer rides in purple):

• TUESDAY was 6x5 min efforts (2:30 easy between efforts).

• THURSDAY was 4x10 min efforts (5:00 easy between efforts).

• SATURDAY was 3x10 min efforts (5:00 easy between efforts) that were 40 sec hard then 20 sec easy.

Here's Thursday's 4x10 mins, which was a leap from a more "normal" 3x10:

And my brother-in-law Matt ("new Matt") mentioned a brutal workout he did, so I did my version of that on Saturday. I warmed up a bit, threw in a 5 min "building" effort as part of the warm-up, and then did 3x10 efforts that were 40 sec hard then 20 sec easy. This was not fun:

My last 10 min effort was 1 min seated then 1 min standing,
so that's why my heart rate looks different than the first 2 efforts.

After a bigger week on the trainer with some solid intensity, I might back off on my long run this morning. We'll see how I'm feeling. (I mean, a "normal" 3-4 hours isn't really THAT different from the 4.5 hours I did this past week, but I felt like I had bigger/better workouts this past week.)