Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Chain me to the wall

LinkTorture dungeon . . . . is riding the trainer really that bad?

'Tis the season to be riding on the trainer in the basement.
Torture? Perhaps.
A necessary evil? Yes, in my opinion, if you want to be fit for the season.
I am not quite as fortunate as riders further south who can ride all year long.

The PowerTap is helping the time go by faster and adds something to focus on. I am looking forward to finally getting my power zones dialed in. Once that happens there will be no guess work and no wasted time on how hard I should be pedaling.

Today's workout. I think I need to change the battery in the heart rate strap - it seemed to be all over the place (the red line) and at times it didn't seem to be picking up a reading.

After work I jumped right on the trainer. The goal was to keep a steady, one hour endurance paced ride with watts plugged in at just a wee bit above 200. I'm still running tests to find my ideal power levels, so 200 watts might be too high or too low. I'm finding that one test is not enough and am doing a few tests at different intervals to find an average. But sitting at just above 200 watts felt fine today.

Today I added in two 30 second tests to check the power I could throw down. A little disappointing in the power department, but then again I've barely been on the bike since November (this was like my seventh trainer ride), so lots of room for improvement.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I logged 8 minutes on the trainer yesterday. It was awesome
df