Well, it had to come to an end. I'm talking about both daylight savings time and the warm weather. We will be heading indoors starting this Tuesday, Nov 6. Randy sent out a note with time (be there about 5:45 and ready to ride at 6:00 sharp) and location (Team Fitness in Urbandale). Bring your own bike, indoor trainer (stationary actually works better than rollers for some of the things we do such as one legged pedaling) or rollers if you are working on mastering them. Bring a towel and water bottle.
There are numerous reasons to do these indoor training sessions - here are a few: Provide a group indoor ride to help push you harder than you might by yourself, to continue to work on aerobic fitness during the winter, to have some company when riding your trainer, to do team bonding, to teach people how to ride rollers, and to train for roller races.
Here's how it works. You arrive, set up, change and get on your bike by 5:50 and start warming up. The formal training session begins at 6:00. We'll start the hard work at 6:10 so be ready and warming up by 6:00. Unlike our outdoor rides, we don't wait for people indoors! One reason for this is so we can be out of Team Fitness by 7:00 PM. This year, the main training purpose of these sessions is to give you a good, hard aerobic session once a week. Even though we may do intervals, these are more of an aerobic type, versus anaerobic intervals. Here's the difference. Anaerobic intervals push you into your anaerobic range above your aerobic threshold. Your aerobic threshold is similar to your time trialing pace. With anaerobic intervals, you are supposed to take long enough recovery periods to be recovered enough by your next interval to give another hard effort. An example of an anaerobic interval would be 2 min hard effort followed by a 3 min recovery, repeated several times. Anaerobic intervals are necessary and important as you prepare for your races, but not this time of year. In contrast, aerobic intervals are important to do year round. Aerobic fitness is your foundation upon which all your other training is based. These intervals are less intense but also have a shorter recovery period so that the recovery isn't complete but you aren't going above your aerobic threshold much either. This gives you a more constant heart rate right around your threshold to maintain or even improve that during the winter. An example of an aerobic interval is one min at or slightly above your time trial pace with one min easier but not too easy. So this winter I'll be giving you a variety of aerobic intervals to work on.
Each Sunday or Monday I'll be sending out the workout for the Tuesday night. If you can't make the group ride, you can replicate it at home.
Week #1:
10 min warm up
One 10 min interval at sub aerobic threshold (slightly lower than time trial pace)
5 min recovery
A second 10 min interval at sub aerobic threshold
5 min recovery
A third 10 min interval at sub aerobic threshold
5 min warm down.
We'll see you there.