From the moment I saw it on my workout schedule, I was not looking forward to today’s bike workout.  I hadn’t done anything like it before, and it look incredibly hard.

The workout consisted of a ten minute warm up, followed by one hour at around 85% of my FTP.  For this hour, I needed to alternate between doing two minutes of big gear work, and then two minutes of high cadence work, all at the same target power. 

With other things on my schedule, I needed to do the workout early in the morning. I got up very early, had a coffee and a slice of toast, and then procrastinated as long as I could. Eventually, I went down to the basement and got on the bike.

So how did it go? It actually went quite well.  It was a fascinating workout, in that it felt like I was right on the edge of blowing up, but I never did.  I think the biggest challenge  was mental; doing 30 separate, two minutes intervals seemed daunting. Even after I had been riding for quite a while, it still seemed like I had forever still to go.

I found the high cadence intervals to be more of a challenge.  This is because I am naturally a low cadence rider.  The big gear, low cadence intervals, almost seemed like recovery intervals, in comparison to the high cadence work.

Eventually I did get through the hour and even managed to push little higher power, for the final few minutes.  In hindsight, I don’t really know what I was dreading; I did OK.  In fact, I want to try this workout again, some time in the future.  I think I can go a little harder right from the start…. but who knows?  Maybe that will just cause me to crash and burn. It will be fun to try though….