This is bit of an impromptu post that occurred to me while I was traveling so I thought I would share it. So for the past two nearly three weeks I have been working on my swimming and my bike, my midweek rides have been typically riding along with the Sufferfest with a long ride at the weekend I have also tried a couple of rides using TrainerRoad
To mix it up I decided to ride a Spinervals DVD that came with my Kurt Kinetic trainer and during the week I rode a #17 “Threshold Test and SufferFest”. Before I get into the results I have to say that this is THE MOST BORING RIDE DVD EVAH!!! Watching a dozen or so riders on trainers in a Mercedes Dealership…really, really!!!
You pays your money and takes your choice!
I mean come on, as I side note rant this DVD retails for $30, for that and the price of a cup of coffee get yourself three Sufferfests or six CycleFilm DVDs which are currently on sale!
Now that being said there is some benefit to this DVD which is the 20 minute Functional Threshold Test, it’s a steady state effort over 20 minutes designed to allow you to work out your cycling zones and power output…the idea is to ride at a sustainable pace somewhere around 85-90% of your RPE (Rate of Perceived Effort), from there you take the average HR an plug it into this calculator…easy!
Slow build up to the 20 minutes
Result in SportTracks
As for the results I was pretty pleased, for the 20 minutes (actually 21 to round it up) I sustained a 20mph pace, average HR 153.8 let’s say 154, so there is plenty of headroom there and my average cadence was 91.25; not too fast or slow. So when I plug my heart rate into the calculator I get the following:
So armed with the data I can upload it into my Garmin Edge 500 and this will allow me to make sure my hard rides are hard and my easy ones easy…of course all of this was done on my Cervelo road bike and I will need to execute and update it on the Cannondale Slice once I have sorted out the saddle…more on that later!
I can't believe that video! Good luck with the HR training. For me, the hardest part of HR training is mental - staying below 124 on the "easy" recovery workouts.
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