Birthday Bike Ride

My birthday was earlier last week, and I was resting my legs that day after the USATF MN Indoor Championship 5000 meters. So I didn't do anything athletically fun on my birthday - I just went out with a friend who I hadn't seen since before he had his last kid... who's over 4-years-old now.

It wasn't until a few days later that I remembered that I've been doing "birthday rides" over the last few years: I went for a 40+ mile when I turned 40 and I biked the equivalent of 41 miles on the trainer (2 hours and 13 minutes) last year when I turned 41.

So on Saturday, I hit the trainer WONDERING if I could last over 2 hours. I didn't really know how long I wanted to go, and I was OK just going a BIT longer than normal. But after I got going, I was determined to make it at least 2 hours and 15 minutes.

I did a longer warm-up, and then I did 8x5 min efforts with 2:30 rest between. Normally, that would be a decent workout, but then after about 10 minutes of easy spinning, I also tacked on 11x1 min efforts with 1 min easy spinning between. And then a longer cool down to hit 2 hours and 16 minutes:

My heart rate tells the story of the workout pretty well.

And as a sidenote, I posted about a 2 hour and 1 min trainer ride last month that I THOUGHT was my longest ever, but I had forgotten about last year's birthday ride. So after learning that and then going for this long ride a few days ago, I've now had 2 out of my 3 longest trainer rides over the last 5 weeks (with all 3 happening within the last year).