Focused Training

It's been a week of slightly lesser intensity than last week, despite last week starting light, it ended with a boom. Despite the lower intensity - according to Strava - it's been a solid week. I knocked out both the run and ride stage 4 of the Tour of Makuri on Zwift with easy-ish effort level Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday, I ran a short training session of three groups of five 1min reps off 30s recovery. Paced at 108% 5k pace. Realistically I should be faster than that for short reps but my resting heart rate was still a little on the high side and I factor things by that. Friday was a short session on the bike, consisting three ramped efforts, each one longer than the previous. The final effort was hard, requiring me to lift from the seat in order to complete.

Today I really focused in on a session which I used to do many many many moons ago. Six 1km reps at faster than 5k target pace with a 2-minute recovery. I ran the first three at 106% but ramped the last three up to 109% (which was faster than Thursday's short reps!). It felt hard but I think I had more. I'm not quite at the stage where I can really push myself to the limit but that will come in time. (I've no trouble doing that on the bike, so it's just a confidence thing, having deteriorated so far with my running). Anyway, of all the session I used to do, this was the one I used to really target the 5k.

I finished off the day's training with stage 5 of the Tour of Makuri on the bike and ended up riding harder than the recovery ride it was meant to be. I didn't get competitive - well, not until the last kilometre - but I had to ride a bit harder than intended to stay in the pack. Eventually I got dropped and rode in with another rider until the last k - when stupidly they went for it, and I couldn't help myself....