The Cyclocross Workout Of The Day for Tuesday, 9.22.15. “Wormhole”
Howdy folks,
Wait a second…
It’s Tuesday already?
How the heck did that happen?
Weird.
Some kind of a wormhole opens during cyclocross season, and the days just fly by.
It may be a gubmint conspiracy to disrupt the fabric of time, but whatever happened, it’s now Tuesday. Time to get some work in!
Or not.
If you did the double – raced both days this weekend – you probably shouldn’t hit it hard today.
Take the day off.
Heck, if you raced on Sunday, and you aren’t feeling fully recovered today, you should think about taking the day off.
If you’re feeling good though?
It’s 2×20 Tuesday!
Since you’re feeling good, we’re going to throw in a happy ending today! What’s that? Read on…
– Warm up.
– Go as hard as you can for 20 minutes.
– Recover for 2 minutes.
– Go again for another 20 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 both intervals without being forced to go easier at the end of the second interval. If you run out of gas before you finish the second interval, you went to hard. If your vision isn’t blurry at the end of the second 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 another workout that works great on the trainer, and that’s how I do ‘em, which is a good thing… because I always wind up flat on my back on the floor trying not to puke after the 2nd interval.
I’m really not kidding about the seeing spots thing.
But hey… that’s not all.
This is the Happy Ending version.
What does that mean?
Immediately after your 2nd twenty minute interval, you’re going to begin a series of five, ten-second “sprint” efforts, with 50 seconds of recovery between them.
It looks like this…
After 2nd 20 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
PS – The Wednesday Night Cyclocross Workouts at Marymoor Park start tomorrow night! Come on out!
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If your race is 1 hour, should you do 3×20?
3×20 is really, really hard. Most folks do these in 10-minute blocks, and that’s what I recommend. 5 minute recovery between blocks, and you stop when you can’t hit the goal wattage anymore. Very few folks will be able to do that for a race length aggregate time.
make sense?
M
Yep. My alternative threshold workout is 6×10 minute. I’m doing these outside ride now, so now wattage. Just HR and RPE. I’ll be back to 100% trainer time as soon as DST hits though and then it will again be very precise.
Cool. Keep in touch, let us know how they go!
M