Back on the Bike: 32-Day Spinervals Challenge

Yeah, it's been awhile.....

After a crazy few months of LOTS and LOTS of work travel and therefore not much swimbikerun (but lots of strength training, which has been a fun diversion), I'm itching to get back to tri training so I can start '12 feeling strong and READY. I am going to Coach Troy's training camp again this March and want to arrive in tip-top shape when I tackle Mt. Lemmon - I'm totally getting to that pie.....

So.... When I saw that Troy came up with this RIDICULOUS 32-Day December Spinervals Challenge, I was in. At first, he was planning to slaughter us with crazy long/hard Spinerval workouts EVERY day from Dec 1 - Jan 1, but after thinking through a bit, he's adjusted it a TAD. It's still ridiculous, mind you. It's going to hurt, and hurt bad. And I'm so stoked about it I can't contain myself!!!!!

Today was Day 1 - I'll try to blog every day, even if only to specify the workout and a brief comment (such as: "I freakin' hate Troy today!!!!" j/k Troy - you know I love you!). Today was 27.0: Threshold Test and Sufferfest. In a nutshell, this workout serves two purposes: it's a great threshold building workout designed to boost your anaerobic threshold and sustainable power output for time trialing events including triathlons, and it also functions as a repeatable field test used by many prominent coaches and exercise physiologists to determine an athlete's Functional Threshold, or that output of work (power) one can sustain on average over a 20 minute period. We were using it for the latter task today, to set our zones for the workouts for the remainder of the challenge.

It's essentially an hour workout with a 20-minute segment of hell in the middle (the TT segment). I'm excited to see how the challenge will improve my numbers when I retest in January!

It was great, and I mean GREAT to be back on the trainer this morning at 5:30am. It was brutal - there is something about that zone you get in during the last 5 minutes of a TT effort - where you are praying for either death or natural disaster to allow you to get off the bike right now, but somehow, SOMEHOW you are able to dig deeper and hold on to your target numbers and you don't let go. That feeling is truly incredible. When you finish, and finish strong (seemingly an impossible notion mid-way through the workout), you feel like a ROCK STAR. Awesome. Just awesome.

I lost approximately 42 lbs of sweat during the hour workout, and I'm SO happy. Clearly.

Let's Get This Party Started!

Holy Hell, that was a BLAST.

Stay tuned for my daily updates!!!!! And check me out on Facebook as well, where I will be regularly commenting about the challenge on my page as well as the Spinervals FB page. And if you are inspired, JOIN THE FUN!