The Cyclocross Workout Of The Day for Friday, 10.24.14. “Tweener”
Howdy folks,
Well, it’s Friday again!
The last several Fridays, we’ve talked about the different ways one can approach their workouts 2 days before an event, and – in short – it almost always comes down to one of two things.
Go hard, or go easy.
You either need to mellow out and get some rest before you do your openers 1 day out from the race, or you need an extra day of effort to prime the pumps.
There’s a third option, though.
What if you’re a tweener?
…and you can’t take it super easy two days out from a race without having dead legs at crunch time, but you also can’t do a full-fledged workout?
You might just need to go on a…
One to Two Hour Moderate Ride –
Get on your bike.
Go ride for an hour or two.
No hard efforts, but do throw in a couple of moderate ones. By moderate, I mean just that. You can sprint for the town line, but you should be laughing while you do it.
You’re not doing a recovery spin, so you need to put a little bit of gas into the pedals… just don’t go out and kill yourself.
Check out the view, smell the flowers, just do it while you’re putting a little bit of effort into the pedals.
1 notch above a recovery ride.
Make sense?
What if you’re saying to yourself “Self… I’m not a tweener, I need to go hard today!”?
Got ‘ya covered.
Good luck, ’cause you’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.
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. 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, and give the last little bit of your energy in one final 10 second sprint.
Ouch.
Have fun!
M
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