Warmup:
-20 min. spin, not as easy as I would have liked because I rode across San Francisco in rush hour traffic to get to the target training spot for the day.
30 min.:
3 x 5 min. LT hill climb intervals (hardest pace you can sustain for 20 minutes without stopping or varying your effort) w/5 min. recovery after each interval.
protocol:
INTERVAL 1: seated, high cadence, LT
INTERVAL 2: standing, high cadence, LT
INTERVAL 3: seated, biggest gear on bike, LT
20 min.: ride home, tempo pace, in traffic with many dead stop/starts at stoplights (these count as micro intervals, very similar to what you would do if doing all-out sprint intervals from a dead stop except you only ramp up your speed to the maximum speed you can sustain in traffic rather than an all-out, tossing the bike from side to side sprint. That just wouldn't be a great idea with cars inches from your shoulder whizzing past in an iPhone/Blackberry/what's for dinner haze. . .).
NOTES:
Every workout you do should have a purpose. Every interval should have a purpose. You should think through what you're going to do and why you're going to do it ahead of time. Otherwise you're just wasting your time and putting yourself through a lot of pain--and getting 'more fit' in the process, but 'more fit' for what?
To give you a glimpse into how I figure out what I might be doing on any given training day, here's how I decided to do today's workout, why I did it, and the specific objectives I hoped to achieve. I share this information because 'training' should not be a passive, robotic activity where you simply follow a workout protocol someone else writes down for you and tells you will work.
If you want to get the most from the time you spend tuning your body and mind, you must have a purpose. That purpose could be something as simple as 'I want to have more energy so I can more fully enjoy the time I get to spend doing my sport on the weekend.' Or, 'I no longer want to be out of breath when I play with my kids after work and I'm just not ready to fork over $50,000 for the gastric bypass just yet.' Or, 'My job puts me in situations where I better be incredibly fit or I'm going to embarrass myself, get my ass handed to me, and fail to achieve the objectives I was given by my employers.' Or, 'I'm tired of feeling like a fatass.' Or, 'I don't want my knees to hurt anymore and I know these exercises will help me to strengthen my ligature and the muscles that support my knee, hips, and lower back and will thereby help me to holistically correct the problem without surgery or amputation.' Or, well you get the point.
Sometimes you don't know what you're training for--i.e., you don't have a super specific event, race, date that you're targeting, but you know that you are building the physical and mental capacity to perform in a situation you may find yourself in in the future, perhaps a survival situation. That's a great reason to train, too.
The word 'train' implies rehearsal and preparation. If you're just going out there and destroying yourself every day with no objective in mind, no matter how small, you're wasting your time, guaranteeing you won't be engaged and mindful when you're performing the intervals or exercises you have chosen or had prescribed for you, and you'll more likely than not end up getting hurt. Even if you work with a personal trainer or take classes, the onus of responsibility for training safely and mindfully is still on your shoulders. When you hand over a check to Lance Romance at the gym to yell at you while you're sweating on a swiss ball, that doesn't mean you abdicate responsibility for your body and mind.
Lance might help direct your thoughts and motion, but make sure you're on board, engaged, mindful, aware, and tuned in to what you're experiencing. For example, what most people perceive as 'pain' while exercising or training is actually just mental and physical discomfort that is occurring within a totally safe range of mental/physical motion. It might not feel good, but that doesn't mean you're in pain. Pain is what you experience when you have physically injured your body, i.e. a sprain, tear, etc. Most of what you experience while exercising/training is simply discomfort. It feels different than your normal state at rest, your lungs burn, your muscles hurt, you may not even be able to listen to music or have anything touching your face because your discomfort is so great.
But that doesn't mean you're in pain. Pain is a torn meniscus. Pain is smacking your head into pavement at 30 miles-per-hour. Pain is a gash in your arm that requires stitches. Pain is getting suckerpunched in the face. Breathing hard while exercising and experiencing soreness? That's just discomfort. The sooner you accept that discomfort, the more comfortable you become in that uncomfortable space, the stronger, fitter, and faster you will become.
To loop back to the impetus for my workout today: II haven't gotten out to do climbing intervals in quite some time, been busy moving to a new city, getting oriented, lifting and moving heavy, awkward objects, working. All the usual 'training' disruptions we all have to deal with.
I've spent a great deal of time walking here in San Francisco, usually about an hour a day just to get around, go to the grocery store, etc., often up and down mongo hills that encompass several hundred vertical feet of ascent and descent. So my aerobic base has probably increased through sheer utilitarian movement.
As you've seen in recent WOD's, I've also found a number of places to do functional strength training for endurance sports near the new HQ. As usual, playground equipment at a nearby park, in my case two blocks away, has served as the perfect training environment. With the addition of a few basic training implements like a TRX, a length of rope and sometimes a med ball, all of which I stuff in an Osprey backpacking pack and carry with me to the playground, I have everything I need to workout anywhere, any time. I guarantee you could drop me into the middle of any podunk town in the middle of Nebraska or into the heart of any major metro area in the US or around the world and I could find somewhere to train within ten minutes. So don't think you need to find a real pull-up bar, gym, Olympic lifting platorm or whatever in order to train. You can train anywhere.
In the middle of all of the life/location changes I've experienced recently, I've made a point of hitting FST sessions at least three times per week + all of the utilitarian walking and cycling for transport that I've been doing. Why? I know my body and I know that getting in three FST sessions per week plus the aerobic base building the other activities I've done just to get around ensure that I have a pretty solid base after 20 years straight of training every day.
But as I planned for this workout, I knew that I needed to start tuning the top end of my fitness again lest I lose it for the time being which would mean I would have to spend even more time down the road trying to regain my anerobic capacity if I continued to not make time to train it.
I had planned to take an easy spin over to the climb I had in mind for my intervals today, but San Francisco traffic meant that wasn't an option. I had to cut and scratch like a DJ to weave my way around cars, make it through lights, start from red's, and stay alive. So I'd gotten in a bit more intensity than I would have preferred prior to the intervals and a little less time warming up my joints and getting them lubricated with very easy spinning than I would have liked. Such are the vicissitudes of life. Plan for perfection but adapt and learn to run and gun or the paradox of choice will paralyze you and you'll end up watching Teletubby reruns and sucking your thumb whining about how conditions weren't right for the super duper workout you had the best intentions of completing but never got off the couch to do.
Once I got to my location, I surveyed several probable hills before settling on my climb/route. I took into account auto and pedestrian traffic, road surface, construction, etc. before settling on my specific route.
Sometimes I'll do repeats of the same interval at the same intensity over and over to target a specific energy system. But that's not where my body or training are at at the moment. Instead I elected to do three discrete intervals, all of the same length, but each with a specific purpose. I performed all in my LT heart rate/power zone because that's the energy system I intended to target today, but I did each using a different cadence and style of motion for the following reasons:
INTERVAL ONE:
-seated, high cadence
WHY? To prime the seated, high cadence motor pattern that I typically use for most of my high intensity climbing, a motor pattern I haven't had the opportunity to rehearse since my 9 hour death ride in a snowstorm a few weeks back.
INTERVAL TWO:
-standing, high cadence
WHY? To rehease/prime body for more high cadence, out of the saddle LT climbing in the future. A necessary skill for ascending super steep gradients, for keeping up on group rides, and for racing.
INTERVAL THREE
-seated, low cadence
WHY? This is similar to weight lifting on a bike. Every pull of the bars felt like rowing my entire body weight, and that's the level of force it required to turn my biggest gear while going up this hill, which featured a number of very, very severe gradients. I find that this style of climbing helps me avoid injury and prepares my ligature for higher intensity, all-out sprints and other intervals I'll be doing as part of my workouts in the coming weeks. But as I started this interval, and throughout, I was acutely attuned to my knees, my other joints and the manner in which I applied force to the pedals and bars. Do this type of interval wrong, and you can blow your knee out. Do it at the wrong point in your training cycle when your body isn't ready for it and you can blow your knee out. Or you can find yourself tweaking out your movement to generate more force and end up injuring your hips, shoulders, elbows, or ankles. By the end of this interval I felt like I'd just done 100 chirpees and nearly loaded my pants at the top of the climb it was so difficult. But I didn't injure myself and I did it safely. I was just experiencing discomfort, not pain.
That's a bit of a glimpse into what goes through my head when I plan and execute the pithy lists of exercises you see posted here daily. When you see those lists, feel free to give the workouts a shot, but I encourage you to start thinking more about what you're doing and why your'e doing it. When you're training, don't let your focus deviate from monitoring your movement for a moment. Over time you will learn how something is supposed to feel when you perform it properly. It's the difference between striking a golf ball improperly and feeling a stinger run up your forearm versus striking it perfectly, hearing a thunk ans watching your motion converted into an epic drive that lands on the green.
Whatever you do, do it mindfully, become comfortable with discomfort and know that by doing so you're making your body and mind stronger for whatever endeavor it is that floats your boat.
Drill it.
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