Something new

Interesting ride this morning. It was supposed to be an interesting swim, but I am keen to swim with the Swim Smooth squad tomorrow (last squad session of the year), so I swapped this morning's session and tomorrow morning's session over.

So anyway, back to my interesting ride. It contained hill repeats, lots of hill repeats. The interesting bit was that the intensity of the hill repeats was governed by a prescribed goal heart rate. I don't tend to train off heart rate that often when it comes to the bike. I more use speed and power as my metrics of choice. I don't have anything against heart rate per se, just the way my preferences have developed over the years. So it was something different to the norm for me.

Given that, I was very interested to see how my body progressed over the course of the session. The hill repeats were broken up into four blocks of 15 minutes. For the first two blocks I had no trouble getting into the upper reaches of the prescribed heart rate zone. In fact several times I had to ease back a bit to make sure I didn't go above where I was supposed to be. As I got into the third set though, and particularly the fourth set, I found it harder and harder to get the heart rate up. I was still getting into the required heart rate zone, but not as high as I had been getting earlier in the session. What I was finding is that as my body fatigued, my legs were becoming the limiting factor, rather than the cardiovascular system. Very interesting to watch the body response.

Hard session for me to get my head around though. Given the amount of time spent doing hill repeats (half of the session) my usual metrics, power and speed, were hit for a six. Average speed certainly goes out the window for a prolonged hill repeat session and even power struggles with the constant up and down. Neither speed or power were where I would normally aim for on a 2 hour ride, so really it left me feeling like the session hadn't gone that well. Silly really because the hill repeats were quite good. Requires more of a mental adjustment than anything I think.

As I said above, heading down to the pool in the morning. Being the last official squad session for the year, fun and frivolity has been promised (plus a bit of hard work). Last week I made a mental note to try and get down if I could arrange it because I think it will be a good session, plus I am keen to put off doing swim training by myself for as long as possible. Hopefully it ends up being a fun morning.