Hi

VeloTron

Tonight's scheduled session was a 45 minutes of power session and I was really very pleasantly surprised how good I felt during the session. Even during the power surges (up to 350W) towards the end of the session I was able to just push through them and I never really developed significant leg fatigue throughout the session, which has not previously been the case.

Such was my surprise that after the session I even ran the Accuwatt programme on the VeloTron to check it out, it was spot on, less that 0.5% out from factory calibration. I can't help but think that the Winter Plan has already delivered a small FTP increase which was not it's main purpose but which is a nice by-product. The main thing about this session was how I felt at the end, as I said yesterday what I'm keen on developing is my ability to go hard for long periods rather than very hard for short periods, that's what I need and that seems to be the direction I'm heading.

As planned I took a blood lactate measurement at the end of the 45 minute effort as a baseline for this session and to see how it compared with previous measurements, I was delighted with the outcome and very surprised.

At the end of the 45 minute effort, which included surges to 350W every 3 minutes, my blood lactate reading was 3.4 mmol/l which I was delighted with and which was far lower than I had anticipated. This strongly suggests, and this is supported by my RPE, that in terms of blood lactate I was exercising in a steady state and that my blood lactate was not steadily climbing at this exercise intensity.

I had expected the level to be higher as even though the average wattage for the 45 minute effort was just 275W I thought the 30 second surges up to 350W would have had the effect of further elevating my blood lactate level.

Anyway, the above suggests to me that this particular session is being done at the right sort of intensity for the purposes for which it is intended. However I need to do further tests on some of my "standard" sessions to ensure that the higher intensity sessions are in fact taking me above the 4.0mmol/l level which I believe is probably required if the types of adaptations I'm looking for are to be brought about.

All very interesting, certainly didn't expect the outcome of tonight to be along these lines!

To review this session: click here.

ATL: 63.6 CTL: 65.0 TSB: 2.8

[Uploaded 13/01/2010 22:25:48]