Bike LTHR

This week has been pretty light as far as workouts go with a grand total of 8:45 of training. I believe that this is mostly due to the fact that we have a few of the fitness tests to perform and you don't want to go into one of those already worn out from the previous days workout.

Monday was the swim fitness test that I already told you about and last night was the Bike Lactate Threshold Test. The way this test works is I had a 15 minute warm up followed by an 8 minute all out sprint, 10 minutes of recovery and then do it again. The purpose of this test is to see how high you can get you heart rate (HR) average during the 8 minutes. From there my coach will use my average HR and percentages of it to set up my HR zones for the duration of the training. The reason that we do this is so that you don't set out on a long ride with a HR higher than you can sustain for the duration of the ride just to burn out before the ride is complete. An Ironman is a long day so you have to learn to pace yourself and using your HR to judge your exertion works perfectly. If you want to get into the scientific side of Lactate Threshold you can read more here. But it gets pretty complicated and I don't understand it all.

For example here are my HR zones that we used during training for the Half Ironman
Z1 0-150bpm (Recovery spins)
Z2 151-163bpm (Normal rides)
Z3 164-170bpm (Tempo rides and long intervals)
Z4 171-182bpm (Short and fast intervals)
Z5a 183-192bpm (Sprints)

The coach and I headed out to the Texas Motor Speedway which has a 5 mile loop that goes around the perimeter of the grounds. For the most part it's flat, well lit and has light traffic on a weekday evening making it perfect for night time riding. Remember also that it snowed here yesterday morning so as dry as the streets were it was still really cold. By the time we were done for the night I believe that it was 40 degrees.

This test is most especially uncomfortable. Imagine getting your HR as high as possible and keeping it there for 8 minutes. That might not seem like a long time on the front end but try getting on the treadmill at your local gym, throw the speed up as high as you can manage and run a mile. Pretty tough huh? By the end of the first 8 minutes I was extremely light headed and was weaving all over my lane, for a reason that is still unknown to me I was salivating as if I was looking at a perfectly cooked steak after being on a week long fast and my chest felt as though my heart was going to burst out à la Aliens. Luckily I had a 10 minute rest in between these intervals and I needed all 10 minutes. Round 2 was just as bad and had the same final results at the end. But at least I could be happy that I didn't have to go for a third round. The other thing that is nice is that this time around as opposed to Half Ironman training was that the test only lasted a grand total of 16 minutes. When I did this test for Half Ironman training it was a half hour straight of bust your butt follow directly by passing out at your car.

So the test results are as follows. During the first 8 minute interval my max. HR was 184 with an avg. HR of 181. I got it down to 137 during the recovery and back up to 180 max. and 176 avg. on the second interval.

Only the run fitness test remains and then we can get on with our regular training weeks.