Two Interval Days: Bike and Track

Thursday I hit the bike hard. I had some time, so I did a slightly shorter version this long trainer ride from last April: I did efforts of 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 minute, with 50% of each interval as easy riding between those efforts. It looked like this:

I mixed up the efforts between being things like just "hard," standing, shifting into an harder gear every minute (you can see that in my heart rate in the 5th effort), alternating standing and seated, etc.

It was 1 hour and 53 mins of spinning, with the "meat" of the workout taking about 70 minutes.

Then the next day, I hit the track. I did 12x400 done as 3x(4x400) with 60 sec rest between the intervals and 3 mins between the 3 sets. It's an "easier" way to get 400s done... by splitting it up like that. I didn't know where I'd be starting my splits - would my first one be around 1:20? Then could I drop them down? I didn't plan/expect them to be averaging in the 1:14s and 1:13s like early last year, but I was going to go as hard as I could.

As I expected, the first one WAS a bit slow, but the first set was about as good as I could have hoped:

1:19.0, 1:16.7, 1:15.1, 1:16.4 = 1:16.80 ave

I was happier to drop a second off the average of the 2nd set:

1:16.2, 1:15.3, 1:14.7, 1:16.6 = 1:15.70 ave

And then another runner appeared on the track when I was ready to start my final set, and that always pushes me a bit more. I was REALLY happy taking off some more time in this set:

1:15.1, 1:12.3, 1:12.1, 1:12.9 = 1:13.10 ave

Each set of 4 got faster through the 3rd interval, then the 4th one was a bit slower. Interesting.

Yes, it wasn't as fast as last year's version of this workout (overall averaging 1:15.2 this time vs. 1:14.0 last time), but I was pretty happy with this after a winter of lacking speed work... it also shows I still have work to do if I hope to be anywhere near last year's speed.

Lots of laps.


Close-up of walking around the start/finish line.


I only believe that one SPIKE in my heart rate - I don't believe
my HR was maxxing out ONLY in the 140s for those efforts.