The Cyclocross Workout Of The Day for Friday, 9.26.14. “Kids, maybe try this at home.”
Howdy folks,
Yay! It’s Friday!
Time to start thinking about the weekend’s racing, eh?
If you’re racing tomorrow (Saturday) today’s workout is pretty cut and dried, you should be doing some kind of an openers workout.
How about some…
Can Openers –
Here’s the drill:
– Warm up for 1/2 hour or so.
– Follow with several short attacking efforts, IE 30 seconds at 80% of your max, or pretty damn hard.
– Back off and spin for 5 minutes.
– Follow with 10-15 minute effort at AT level, or CP30, or “I could talk to you if I had to, but I don’t want to” level.
– Spin for several minutes.
– Follow with 5-6 full gas sprint efforts on a straight section of paved road, level or slightly uphill.
Do half of these from a near standstill, and for 1/2 of them, get going at a pretty good clip before you start the sprint.
… spin out the legs, go home, and get ready for the race.
What’s that you say?
You’re not racing tomorrow, you’re racing on Sunday?
First of all read this post from last week.
***********
Okay?
Got all that?
We went easy on Friday last week, we’re going hard today.
We’re trying it both ways and keeping track of the results.
Remember, this is a bit of an experiment.
For most folks, the default for a race weekend should be a pretty easy day two days before the event, but ‘ya gotta try it both ways and see what works for you.
If you do the following workout and bomb your race on Saturday, at least you’ll have learned something.
That’s a victory in and of itself.
So, with that in mind, today we’re doing…
The 3×10 with Happy Ending…
– Warm up.
– Go as hard as you can for 10 minutes.
– Recover for 2 minutes.
– Go again for another 10 minutes.
– Recover for 2 minutes.
– Go again for another 10 minutes.
That’s the basic version. Success on this is, however, all in the details.
The idea here is to go as hard as you can for the duration of all 3 intervals without being forced to go easier at the end of the subsequent interval(s).
If you run out of gas before you finish the second or third interval, you went too hard.
If your vision isn’t blurry at the end of the last interval, you went too easy.
If you’re doing this with a powermeter, you want your wattage output to be as close to constant as possible. We’re talking 10 watt variance at the most. Keep it steady.
These take practice to do well, and the better you get, the harder they get.
This is a workout that works great on the trainer, and that’s how I do ‘em.
But hey… that’s not all.
This is the Happy Ending version.
What does that mean?
After the third ten-minute interval,
-spin for 1 minute.
sprint for ten seconds, starting at the one minute mark on your watch.
-spin until you hit the 2 minute mark on your watch
sprint for ten seconds
-spin until you hit the 3 minute mark on your watch
sprint for ten seconds
Etc., etc., continuing until you hit the five minute mark (ten minute, if you’re really motivated, or a bit of an animal), and give the last little bit of your energy in one final 10 second sprint.
Ouch.
Have fun!
M
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