Week 6: Triathlon Training - Monday Night Bike Ride (Workout #2 of the Day)

There it is in all of the glory. My bike workout from last night. I was tired from my first day back after break. What is it about coming back to school and leaving completely wiped out craving junk food, chocolate, and fast food? I came home after missing the family who were all at home enjoying their final days of break and hung out with them. Amanda took off to get a run in at the Y. I am so proud of her for getting back into the swing of things. We are so busy that it is almost impossible for her to find 30 minutes to run. She made time and she did awesome!

After getting the kids to bed I had to muster up some motivation to go downstairs and ride. I really just wanted to lay on the couch, watch football, and hang out with Amanda. However, I have dedicated myself to this training. I finally got on the bike around 8:30 and completed my 75 minute bike workout.

Here was the plan.



I started off nice and easy on the second gear up front and the middle gear on the back to warm up. You can see on the chart above the first 9 laps were my warm up where I slowly increased my mile pace getting ready for the workout at hand. These 10 x 1 minute hill climbs killed me. For each of these 60 second all out efforts I would move the highest possible gear and stand and pedal for 30 seconds. This just burned my quads like no other. I would then sit down and pedal as hard as I could for the final 30 seconds. When the minute was up I moved the back gear to the middle as a 2 minute recovery for 2 minutes and then repeated 10 times. My legs were fried by the 60 minute mark when I finished so I just rode the bike at a comfortable pace the next 10 minutes. With about 5 minutes to spare I figured I could get to 29 miles. Looking at the chart you can see that I really pedaled hard the last mile split to get to 29 miles.

It was a great workout. I was whooped afterwards. At least I had a great football game to watch to keep me entertained. I finished with a shake and some crackers before heading to bed to be awoken by my 8 month old. Needless to say 4:30 came around rather quickly this morning.