CP20

Last week was a good week. September had been a month of me trying to ignore the fact that my achilles does not want to play ball as far as attempting running a marathon is concerned and it's taken me a while to reconcile that fact but from that I have managed to focus on the other things that I need to be doing, completing a solid 14 hours this week. A few months ago I bought a heart rate monitor with the intention of using heart rate zones to inform my training more accurately instead of my usual, 'That feels like the right pace / tempo / cadence' etc. I learnt a lesson about buying second hand goods off the internet the hard way when the monitor turned up intact but with the operating instructions in French. :-/   It then took me the best part of six weeks to finally get it synched up so that I could actually download the data to my laptop and analyse what I was seeing. Doh... So this week I started the process of collecting some data by doing a CP20 test on the turbo as described in Joe Friel's book, 'Going Long'. Basically, the protocol was to warm up for 10 minutes and then hammer the pedals for 30 minutes as hard as I could, recording my heart rate for the duration. The average heart rate that I would achieve for the final 20 minutes would give me my lactate threshold heart rate (LTHR), my heart rate where, in rough terms, my body stops using fat as its primary energy source (lots of it but harder for the body to utilise) and begins using glycogen, which is stored in the muscles (easy to utilise but not much of it). The trick is to find that spot which allows a triathlete to be at the top of their aerobic zone, burning fat, without straying into their anaerobic zone which is where glycogen starts to be burned and the resulting by-product of lactic acid being produced which causes fatigue. The test was hard; really hard. My legs found it increasingly more difficult to maintain the cadence that had seemed relatively easy minutes before while my heart rate took a long time to begin to climb. When I hit the stop button and looked at the results I found that my average heart rate (AHR) was a relatively low 148bpm. This may seem like a good thing. When running, 148 would be a slow jog so would it not be the same when cycling? Errr, no.  The results prove (I think) what I already know; my key limiter is muscular endurance, i.e. the power that my legs can produce is so low that my heart rate is not actually able to climb very high. The legs are giving out well before the lungs. So it seems that I need to keep working at this threshold level in order to improve this over the winter and find a way to develop more power. Not easy for a weedy runner with weak ankles.  :-/

I have also completed a swim tt as part of the winterswim challenge which I will be using to give me some swimming targets over the coming months. (6.39mins / RPE8 so more to come). Swimming at Hampton Pool has been great fun, it's a really nice environment to swim in, apart from the old lady doing a simultaneous arm back stroke with breast kick; strange.