The Cyclocross Workout Of The Day for Tuesday, 10.27.15. “Not what we’ve done the last couple of weeks”
Howdy folks,
Well, this one is going up late today. Sorry about that, had a bunch of work to catch up on. It’s been a busy couple of days!
I was really tempted to post up our Tuesday standby the 2×20 today, especially after hearing from a couple of people who had questions on the details of the workout, and from another couple of folks who had breakthroughs in the workout after drilling away at it the last couple of weeks.
Next week we’ll take another shot at that one. Today, though?
Today we’re doing…
The MB15 –
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!
15 seconds on
15 seconds off
15 seconds off
…and so on and so on for the duration of the interval.
How long are you going to do this for?
– Ten minutes
How many sets?
– Three -four sets, 5 minutes between sets. Ideally, you aspire to pile enough ten-minute segments on top of one another to equal the duration of your races.
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 harder than that.
A fair bit harder would be good.
Ideally, you’ll hit these on periods at right about 150% of your FTP, if that’s a number that means anything to you. If it doesn’t, it’s harder than what you’re dong your 2×20 effort at. A fair bit harder.
Like I said, “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.
Want to know the real “Ouch”?
Ultimately, you want to be able to do 6 sets of these, or 3 sets twenty minutes each, or however many it takes to equal the duration of your races.
Seriously, Ouch.
Do what you can.
That’s the basics of this workout, but let’s talk about how folks tend to screw this up, shall we?
First of all, you really can’t do this workout correctly with a power meter that’s set to anything other than instantaneous power display. Even a 3-second display rate can screw things up; that’s 20% of the interval duration!
So, go check your PM settings and adjust accordingly.
Next big screw up? These aren’t sprints.
You’re looking to nail these output levels for the duration of the intervals, not way overshoot them and then coast back down to them.
If you’re doing a 300 watt “on” segment, that means 300 watts for 15 seconds, not 400 watts for 5 seconds and then 250 watts for 10 seconds.
That’s fine and all, but it’a different exercise.
A corollary to this is, on the “off” segment, you aren’t coasting. Ever. You’re doing 50% of your ftp. It’s not uncommon at all for people to experience the “off” portion as just as hard – or harder! – as the “on” section as the overall duration of the interval set reaches the duration of your race day.
In graphic form, your workout should look more like a square wave –
Than like this…
(yup, snipped from a real-life attempt at this workout)
Make sense?
Have fun,
M
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