Sunday and Monday were a pretty rare pair of back to back recovery days. Sunday was an hour and forty-five minutes and Monday was just over an hour. Sometimes the hardest thing is to go slow. On both days, my average HR was at or below 100, and average power was well below my active recovery ceiling of 160W. So pretty easy days just tooling around. The only 'challenging' part was the heat, it being around 90 for both rides.
Today, I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do on the bike. It sort of depended on the weather and how I felt. I actually left the house thinking I'd do my one 'long' ride of two hours today, but ended up doing my testing ride instead. As it turned out, that was the right decision to make.
After warming up for about 10 minutes, I came to the first 'test', Dole Hill. I wanted to do this at a higher intensity than I normally do, and averaged around 380W for the 3 minute effort. I continued on my merry way and did some more shorter duration tests, covering Critical Power for .2 minutes (12 seconds) and 1 minute and PeakPower for 5 sec, 10 sec, 20 sec, 30 sec, 1 min and 2 min. It was a very successful day for testing. In the table below, I've listed the intervals I tested, my best power for them (prior to today's tests), my goals for those intervals and lastly my results for today. Today's results that are highlighted in yellow indicate a new personal best. In all but one case, these personal bests were also above the goal levels I had sest for myself.
| Interval | Previous Best | Goal Power | Today's Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| CP .2 | 770w | 800w | 823w |
| CP 1 | 485w | 500w | 510w |
| 5 sec PP | 931w | 1000w | 1022 |
| 10 sec PP | 829w | 900w | 971w |
| 20 sec PP | 654w | 700w | 641w |
| 30 sec PP | 573w | 600w | 620w |
| 1 min PP | 485w | 500w | 510w |
| 2 min PP | 383w | 400w | 396w |
After completing my testing, I headed back for home, and just barely not in time. About 7 miles from home I started getting a few sprinkles, but nothing too bad, but looking off to the north and north west I could see some pretty dark clouds coming in and I occaisionally thought I heard thunder rumbling in the distance. So I picked up the pace, trying to outrun the coming storm. It caught me as I was coming up over Dole Hill, just a mile or two from home. Big fat drops of water started coming down pretty heavily, so I pulled in at a local campground to wait it out. I was stuck there for about 30 minutes while a pretty serious thunderstorm passed through the area. It rained incredibly hard and there were lightening strikes just across the road from the campground, close enough so that I could only count to 1 between the flash and the bang. Finally though, the rain passed and I was able to go the rest of the way home.
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