Training Week Six
This week has been week six following the British Cycling 8 week pre-season training plan.
In a Nutshell
It was a week out of routine with the kids on February break, and I missed my daily cargo biking. The two tough turbo sessions in the week had the weird effect of disturbing my sleep and the weekend saw a return to the days of cycle and rest with the kids away at their grandparents.
Out Of Routine
This week has been February break with the kids off school. This means that my normal daily routine goes to pieces and I have both children all day long. I like the school holidays. I like being able to decide on a whim what to do each day. I like the fact that every other sentence I utter in the morning is not “please, hurry up!”, unlike during school mornings. But I miss my daily cargo biking.
While the rest from 70’ish miles a week on a heavy bike is probably a good thing in terms of focused training, I do find it harder to get motivated to head out to the turbo trainer in the evenings. I also find that I have far more jobs to get done in the evenings as I have no time when both children have been out all day.
Still, Tuesday night I headed out, not filled with joy at the prospect of 1 hour 40 on the turbo, but at least it was a novel session for me. Intensity Slide was not one I had done before.
For a long session, it actually passed quite quickly. The intervals were quite short; 8 x 15 seconds, 6 x 1 minute and 3 x 5 minutes. The idea of the session is that the intervals are getting longer as you are getting more tired so you are training yourself to give more even when fatigued. Perhaps because of doing so much time trial training with long intervals at fairly high intensity, I did not struggle too much with this. Ok, the intervals were getting longer, but they still weren’t that long, and there were less and less of them.
I felt that the training session went well and that was great. But then I had a really weird night afterwards. Unfortunately, this was one of the (thankfully now rare) nights of being woken up several times by the children in the night. I also kept waking up really hot and sweaty for no reason at all. Really not the best recovery from a tough session!
More Of The Same
Thursday night was a repeat of Tuesday night, in more ways than one. The session was the same as on Tuesday evening. I felt pretty good through the session, which is fantastic. And I woke up ridiculously sweaty several times in the night, which was really not great.
Home Alone
As a special holiday treat (for the kids and for the grown ups!) the kids went to stay over at their grandparents house on Friday night. It was weirdly quiet in the house. Since they were collected at lunchtime on the Friday I was tempted to head out for a cycle. However, I didn’t. My legs felt fine after my turbo sessions but I reasoned that night sweat inducing turbo sessions probably called for rest and recovery, rather than more cycling.
On The Road
After a leisurely breakfast (that’s right, a leisurely breakfast, involving sitting in bed reading a book – thank heavens for grandparents!), I headed out on my road bike for a three hour ride on the Saturday. This was a day like pre-children. A bike ride where I made up the route as I went along. It was a great ride, followed by lying on the sofa for an hour or two. Amazing. It was eerily quiet in the house without the kids though.
Although the kids were back, Sunday was another day on the bike as I was coaching for Hervelo Cycling. Great fun and a good couple of hours on the bike too. We were focusing on climbing which meant plenty of hill climbing for me too!