Last Weeks Training Schedule

by Alan Cole · Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

With Christmas coming and lots of food, drink and relaxing planned, I thought I should at least try to be good in the run up and get some training in. I haven’t done too badly this year. As well as keeping up with the mountain biking I’ve also got a Turbo Trainer that I now use as often as possible and have also started swimming again.

In comparison to what I used to do when I was younger, its a very small amount, but it is something, so that’s better than nothing. I did have a couple of hospital visits during the year though so I’m not feeling as though I’m quite back up to speed yet and feel as though I need to do more to get to where I want to be.

So, I’ve been working on it this week.

Sunday.

Sunday’s exercise was a Mountain Bike Ride at Nant yr Arian. I started off with a fast circuit of the Pendam Trail at race pace, pretty much as hard as I could go. Conditions were good, but I only managed a slightly disappointing time of 40:45, over 3 minutes slower than my personal best of 37:22 back in June of this year.

I then had a ride and a bit of an explore out towards Nant y Moch at a nice easy pace with Dan. As you can see from the Heart Rate graph, I was trying pretty hard on the circuit around Pendam with my heart rate between 85-93% of maximum for 48% of the time and above 93% for 26% of the time.

Sundays MTB Session

Monday.

A fairly easy 50 minutes on the turbo trainer today using one of the ‘Aerobic Endurance’ workouts from Tacx. A gradual increase in intensity but with my heart rate peaking at 147bpm which is less than 85%.

Aerobic Endurance Turbo Trainer Session

Tuesday

Turbo Session at lunchtime. I had planned to do a relatively easy one but at the last minute decided to change my mind and do a long 20 minute warm up followed by a 1 minute interval session comprising 7 reps of:

1 min @ 360 Watts
1 min @ 100 Watts

Unfortunately there was no way I could do this, and only managed 5 reps. Maybe I wasn’t up to it today, or maybe I should stick to 340 Watts for now. Here’s the heart rate trace to show the pain!

1 minute Interval Session

In the evening I went to the ‘swimfit’ class at the university where we had a moderate session with quite a few sprints and some messing around with the bungees at the end.

Wednesday

I had planned both a swim and a night ride, but I had a bit of a cold and I ended up setting up my new iMac instead. For some reason I find such things really sressful and wanted to get it as close to completion as possible before going to bed so didn’t have any time for training.

Thursday

First session today was on the Turbo Trainer and a session I made up myself. After a warm up I did six 4 minute reps, where I started at 80RPM and increased my cadence by 5RPM every 30 seconds up to 115RPM. The first one was with the slope set to -3 and I increased this for each rep. (-3, -2, -1, 0, +1 & +2). Basically the session got harder and harder but there was a bit of rest whilst the RPM was low.

Thursday's Workout

As you can see from the Heart Rate graph the intensity ramped up throughout the session.

I then went for a swim. Nothing too mad here, just some 100m Individual Medleys and some 100m swims, but I felt better for doing it.

Friday

I’d hoped to have a turbo trainer session today, but time and other commitments conspired against me.

Saturday

I was in Bristol for the weekend so had planned a nice ride with Brad, Matt, Dan and Pete. Bard was too hungover so it was just me Matt, Pete and Dan. Unfortunately my bike wasn’t playing so I had to go on Matts Kona Stinky. Not only does it weigh a tonne but it isn’t exactly set up for cross-country use. Needless to say it was a slogf, but I made it around and didn’t let any of the hills beat me.

As you can see though, the initial climb was hard work!