Crosssports's Weblog

Howdy folks,

Before we get started, a couple of quick notes for the Seattle locals…

– The Legendary Marymoor Wednesday Night Cyclocross Training Series starts up it’s 47,000th season tomorrow, Wednesday the 24th. We’ll get things rolling at 6:30, hope to see you there!

– I’ll be leading a Cyclocross Skills clinic out at St.Edwards Park this Saturday at 1pm. Price is $10 or whatever you can afford if you’re honestly broke or a Jr. rider. If you like the stuff we do on here, I’m pretty darn sure you’ll get a kick out of the Clinic, so come on down!

OK, on with The Workout Of The Day (and it’s a doozy…)

The MI-30

Warm up well. (Seriously. Warm up for this one, it’ll help.)

The basic idea here is to do a series of very short efforts with very little rest between them, for a pretty long period of time.

Sound confusing?

Here’s how it breaks down…

Warm up.

Get set…

Go!

30 seconds on

30 seconds off

30 seconds on

30 seconds off

…and so on and so on for the duration of the interval.

How long are you going to do this for?

Well…honestly?

In a perfect world, you’d do enough sets of enough length that the total would roughly equal the duration of your races.

Yeah. Geezus.

Good luck with that!

Unless you’re a total beast and you’ve been practicing these damn things in secret, I doubt that’s going to happen.

So…

 Ten minutes would be great.

Three sets, 5 minutes between sets.

How hard do you go during the “on” segments?

Pretty darn hard.

You’re familiar with the level of effort you put out in your 2×20′s by now, right?

You need to go at least that hard.

Harder would be good.

Ideally, you’ll hit these on periods at right about 150% of your FTP, if you’re down with FTP…

(FTP, I said FTP. Sigh…)

That’s about 1/2 again as hard as your 2×20 level.

To make things even more simple?

your level of output should be such that you can barely finish the damn intervals on the last set.

Ouch.

How easy do you go during the “off” segments?

– A lot easier, but you aren’t quite soft pedaling.

Right about 50% of your FTP, or half as hard as your 2×20 level.

Again, ouch.

Remember, ultimately, if you’re racing for 60 minutes, you want to be able to do 6 sets of these, or 3 sets twenty minutes each.

Seriously, Ouch.

Maybe not today though, eh?

Today, 3 sets of ten minutes is pretty darn good.

Heck, it’s probably really damn good.

Don’t kill yourself, eh?

Spin your legs out/warm down when finished.

Enjoy!

M

~ by crosssports on September 22, 2014.

Posted in Cyclocross, Intervals, The Workout Of The Day
Tags: Bicycle racing, bike racing, cx classes, cx handling drills, cx intervals, CX practice, cx skills, CXWOTD, Cycling, Cyclo-cross, Cyclocross, cyclocross classes, cyclocross handling drills, cyclocross instruction, cyclocross intervals, Cyclocross Practice, cyclocross skills, cyclocross workouts, Fitness, Health, Heart rate, Howy folks, Intervals, Marymoor CX, Marymoor cyclocross, Marymoor practice, Personal Training, Physical exercise, Running, s: Aerobic exercise, Seattle, Sports, The Workout Of The Day Tags: Bicycle pedal, wootd, WOTD, XC Racing