Rain, Rain, Go Away

Well, the weather didn't co-operate at all yesterday, Saturday, so I had to do some switching around of my schedule. I suppose I could have just done my 3 hour ride on the trainer rather than switch my recovery ride to Saturday and my 3 hour ride to Sunday, but I have hopes that the weather will be at least marginally better on Sunday.

It is sort of interesting how challenging 1:40 can be on the trainer as opposed to outdoors. It could be that I'm just still fatigued from the harder workouts this week, and I'm sure that is part of the answer. But I think that the very steady nature of trainer recovery rides plays a part too. On this particular ride, my average power and my normalized power were a mere 1 watt apart, which indicates to me a pretty danged steady effort with no real changes in pace. Perhaps the changes in pace are what make it seem easier on the road, and maybe I need to try and replicate that on the trainer next time. Plus it is just mentally tougher to put time in on the trainer, especially after getting used to getting outside to ride.

At any rate, I took it really easy for my recovery ride. I had read an interesting post by either Hunter Allen or Andrew Coggan, I forget which, on the Wattage forum on TopicA where he said that on his recovery rides he goes extremely easy, so I did the same. I averaged 124W, giving me an intensity factor of only .43, which is pretty close to the lowest I have had since I got the PowerTap and have been able to see it.

The easy day did give me a chance to play around with some of the data I've accumulated in the past month or so. Below is a graph of my peak normalized power for 60 minute and 20 minute periods over the past 28 days, with trendlines for each (the dashed lines). I'm not sure how much the upward slope of both data sets has to do with improved fitness and how much is just a result of starting in on harder intervals, but in any case it is nice to see the appearance of improvement.