Spoke To Soon

Well my trainer decided to play some more games with me last night. So I shot it dead. Then I went out and bought a CycleOps Magneto trainer. The resistance from the new trainer feels way different from the other one. The old one had a knob with 5 positions for more or less resistance. This one just builds resistance as your wheel goes faster. It feels like a harder workout on the new one.

The coolest thing about the Cycleops one is the quick release for attaching and detaching your bike. It takes about one second to get your bike on and off, which is cool in and of itself for everyday use, but at races this could be a huge bonus.

Included in this package of training slendor was a "Race Day" video, which is a point of view video of Robbie Ventura and his two team mates at the Master's Crit Nationals. Since I was supposed to do a vaguely crit-like workout last night, I threw this mother in and did the workout. You warmup "with" their team, then do the race, then coold down. First of all, if the wattages on the screen were accurate, that is pretty ridiculous. They were shooting up to 800 watts like it was nothing. I get up there a little more rarely. Second, you never really notice how hooked up you get from the small moments of not pedaling in crits. In this race, RV spent 7 of 40 minutes not pedaling. I spent 0 minutes not pedaling, which is especially dagger when in a really hard effort. Despite going out too hard, I lasted through the whole thing at some ridiculous wattage level (average through warmup and race was a little over 90% FTP, I wish I had hit an interval as the race started) and a far more ridiculous heart rate. There are a lot of ways to construct an average and crits are a particularly heart rate pounding way to do it. Good training and a good reminder that it's one thing to pound away for x number of minutes at y amount of power, but when the race goes up the road if you can't hit it NOW, you can't play.

Word.