Longest Trainer Ride in YEARS (Maybe EVER?)

Just over a week ago, I posted about a nice longer trainer ride. Well I out-did that the following weekend!

My "longer" trainer workouts are usually something like 4x10 min efforts. With a warm-up and cool-down, that will be stretched into 90 or 100 minutes. But about 2 weeks ago, I had the wacky thought of doing a 10 min effort, then a 9 min effort, then an 8 min effort, etc, etc, all the way down to a 1 min effort, with 50% of that as rest time (so 10 mins hard, 5 mins easy, 9 mins hard, 4:30 easy, etc). That would be 55 mins of hard riding with 27 mins of easier riding in between, with the "guts" of the workout lasting 1 hour and 22 mins.

I warmed up for a bit and got to work. My heart rate showed the story of the 10 efforts that got shorter and shorter:

Efforts of 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 minute.


Highlighted in case you can't see them. ;)

I wasn't sure I'd be able to finish after the first few intervals, so I didn't go nuts. Starting my 6 min effort, I was feeling OK and pushed the pace a bit. Once I was starting the 4 min effort, I picked up the effort even a bit more. If I remember correctly, the efforts went: hard, hard, standing, descending to a harder gear every 2 mins (with the last one being just 1 min), hard, standing, descending to a harder gear every minute, hard (standing when needed throughout), hard, and hard.

It was a longer ride, so I wasn't going CRAZY hard throughout. My heart rate zones didn't go nuts:

My weekly "intensity" minutes shows a BIG peak from this long ride last week.

I had to look back at my bigger trainer rides over the years to see how this ranked. Going back in time, I found 1 post from last year, and then I had to go back more than a decade for comparable numbers:

• Oct 2022: doing 1 hr 50 mins on the trainer and noting it was the longest in possibly 12+ years.

• April 2018: a 1 hr 44 min trainer ride that I thought was a SOLID WORKOUT. That's the biggest ride I can find in the years I started to hit the trainer more from 2017-2019 (and I found most of the workouts were 50-80 mins long).

• March 2009: I noted in this post how I had 9 hours of trainer time in Feb which was decent for me back then as I was training for a 70.3 (whereas last month I had more than that while being gone for 11 days and missing 3 trainer workouts).

• Feb 2009: a 2 hour trainer ride (as my wife went for FIVE HOURS!). I guess I beat that last week because I went for 2 hours and 1 minute.

• Feb 2009: a 3 hr and 20 min spinning class to get ready for a 70.3.

Being that 3+ hour workout was a SPINNING class, there's a chance that 2 hours and 1 minute is the longest TRAINER ride I've ever had. Boy, I need to get some multisport races on the calendar... and then make sure I keep some INTENSITY in my training! (And not just these longer efforts.)

UPDATE: I forgot all about riding 2 hrs and 13 mins last year on my birthday. So THAT was my longest trainer ride ever, and this one was 2nd.

Here's my post of my 2022 training totals that I posted last week if you missed it.