If anyone asks me about how to become a better triathlete, I tell them that the key is to be consistent in doing your workouts, and that most of your time spent training, should be at an easy effort.  Putting in the time, allows you to build a really solid base of fitness, that can then be tweaked a little to get some speed, when races are happening.

So having said that, it is important that I follow my own advice.  Today was a good example of a typical, ‘do the work’, day.  I started the day by spending 45 minutes lifting weights and then, early afternoon, I did a two hour bike ride on my trainer.  The chart above is from that ride.

What can we learn from that chart?  The yellow line on the chart is my power output.  You will notice that my power output was always well below the straight white line, my FTP. FTP is Functional Threshold Power, which is the maximum power I can ride at for one hour.  My whole ride was done at less than 75% of my FTP and my average was 66% of FTP. In other words, I rode at an easy effort, well below the hard effort level associated with FTP.

The red line is my heart rate.  You can’t see the numbers, but my heart rate was controlled throughout the whole, two hour ride.  It was always at the low end of Zone 2 or in Zone 1.  The white line is my cadence.  This line doesn’t tell you much, except you can see I slowed my cadence a few times. This was when I came out of the saddle, to give my butt a break. It is easy to push high power when out of the saddle, so keep my effort under control, I slowed my cadence a lot.

This was a very controlled ride.  I varied gears every ten minutes to break up the monotony of the ride, and you can see those changes in the power output curve. 

Overall, nothing exciting to see here, but that is the point.  Rides like these are only valuable when you do them consistently. They build upon each other, to create base fitness.  This means that, just spending time in the saddle is indeed, very important.