Midweek bike intervals

That was good. I was overcome with doubt over the weekend as to whether I was even capable of doing a proper zone 3 interval workout on the bike. Now I have proved to my own satisfaction that I can.

I think that until and unless I am doing hill repeats up to the Alpine police station in the Palisades Park (which won't be likely to happen before mid-May) I should stick with indoors for my interval workout; there's simply no way to concentrate on attaining appropriate effort levels in park crowds/traffic. Brent has often suggested to me that it is worth training indoors on combined grounds of safety and workout quality, but it is one of those things I have to see with my own eyes before I really believe that it's not just a personal cop-out!

I did this workout on one of the fancy spin bikes at Chelsea Piers.

1:10 (avg HR 142, max HR 155)

20min. warmup (5min. easy, 10min. alternating 1 min. standing gear 15, 1 min. seated gear 9 with cadence 100+, 5min. with 30 seconds single-leg on each minute)

5 x 8min. zone 3, 2min. RI

Time broken down by HR zone (my fourth interval was zone 4, inadvertently, as I got into a very animated conversation with the fellow on the bike next to me, who is also riding the Montauk Century in May):

zone 1: 8:38
zone 2: 18:34
zone 3: 24:08
zone 4: 13:26

My HR doesn't drop much in the recovery periods - my bike fitness is clearly far inferior to my run fitness (on my run intervals yesterday, with more or less the same workout structure, HR was dropping 30 beats over the 2 minutes, whereas the bike intervals saw much slighter decline only during rest period). There is much work to be done...