30 miles trainer spin - 1/15/2012

Two out of three aint bad.  I had grand visions of doing a swimming, weight training and cycling session today - but when I got to the pool, more lanes were being used than anticipated for other purposes, leaving only two lap lanes available.  At the time I thought I'd come back later in the day, but then I decided that since January and February are pretty busy times at the pool, and my swimming isn't going to improve by much at all in that time, I mine as well punt on swimming for the most part until at least March.  I think I'll still try to go like twice a month just to keep from regressing, but my time would be better spent on the trainer in the end. 

So anyway, that meant that I only did two of the three originally intended workouts - which I'm still happy about.  The second workout today was about a two hour trainer spin at low intensity.  For some reason, once again the speed graph on the Garmin is rendered incorrectly - it says I peaked at a speed of 23.4 mph, meanwhile when I check my Forerunner 305, it says my peak speed was sub 18 mph.  So here is the SportTracks graph:

At first I didn't worry about the HR being a bit low - I've started to see a trend where it takes about 20 minutes for it to settle into a steady-state range.  However, after an hour, I was still seeing the HR in the 120's - and while my goal was an easy spin, I didn't know if maybe the resistance was still a little low.  So at 1:10:00 I went to one higher gear, which brought the HR up - but I wasn't sure I'd be able to sustain that without the HR creeping close to 140, so I opted to go back down.  I'm still kinda figuring out my HR ranges on the bike - while I know that it seems my HR is often 10 bpm lower on the bike for similar RPE as compared to running, that is entirely based on feel.  Until a have a better idea of what my cycling legs feel like, for these longer spins I'm thinking I'll err on the side of easier.  I'll leave the possibility of more intense workouts for something like hour-long sessions during the week. 

However, in comparing this weeks two hour session with last week - the average speed was virtually identical at 15.4 mph, but this weeks avg HR was a full 10 bpm lower.