One of the main tenets of my training program is to make easy days, easy, and hard days, hard. Today was a hard day, and from the way my quads are burning right now, I certainly worked hard.

Today was made hard by the fact that I had three workouts to do.  I started with a relatively easy, thirty minute run on the treadmill.  This was followed by a lengthy weightlifting workout, that worked my legs hard.  A few hours later, I tackled the bike workout shown in today’s photograph.

This is a very tough bike workout.  I spent a full hour working at a power level that was around 85% of my FTP.  This is a full hour of high Zone 3 work.  What made it more challenging, was the fact that every two minutes, I changed from low cadence, big gear work, over to high cadence work at the same power.

You can see from the white line, that I executed the workout well.  The cadence during that initial warm up period is my natural cadence.  I then did big gear work well below that cadence, and high cadence work, well above it.  It is a great workout for developing my all around cycling skills.

It is not often, that my quads are burning quite like they are this evening.  I don’t recall them feeling this way, after doing this bike workout in the past. Clearly, that weight session earlier in the day, has had a big impact.