After a 20 minute warmup at about 16-16.5 mph (I finally got smart and wore a sweatshirt that I took off. I cycle in a 50-53F basement, but since I know I'm going to get warm, I have a fan on. Since I dont want to stop and dismount to turn on the fan, I turn it on at the beginning - but as I'm not warmed up at that point, having a fan on me blowing 50F air gets chilly. So today I actually used the ole noggin and put an extra shirt on to keep from getting too cold initially), I gave the OLD a shot. I started off with 30 seconds on the right leg, and found it pretty easy and straightforward for the first 10-15 seconds. After that, I ended up reverting to more of a pumping up and down motion, and I think it was more to keep the cadence up. So it ended up being a very uneven-powered cycle - and as a result, tension on the chain and gears was not consistent. By the time I hit 25 seconds, it was pretty atrocious - so that is why I ended up at 30 seconds. After the first leg, my HR was up near 160. So I clipped back in, and gave myself a couple minutes to see if the HR would come down a bit. I repeated the exercise on the other leg, rested, and did the two-leg set a second time.
After that, I decided I was done with that for the evening - I'd have to reassess and re-evaluate my approach before trying it again. Since my HR was already raised, I decided to make it a shorter spinning session and do a couple quick intervals. So after about 5-6 minutes of rest from the OLD's, I increased intensity to 18-18.5 mpg range for one minute, followed by a minute rest, and did four total interval sets.
You can see the online garmin results here, but it is rather pointless. For some dumb reason, Garmin has decided to really expand the HR scale, so you can't see squat on it. And of course the speed is all messed up, thinking I was going at either 15.6 or 23.4 mph - nothing in between. Of course, SportTracks renders the data much more nicely, as shown below:
So you can see the 20 minute warmup with the HR steadily rising (although it did flatten out a bit in the low 140's from 15-20 minutes), followed by the four sharp rises in HR at 20, 23, 24.5 and 27 minutes. Speed dropped as the cadence dropped slightly. Then there was the speed from from 27 to about 33 because I lowered the gear. The intervals were at about 35, 37, 40 and 42 minutes.
In the end, I'm going to try the OLD drills again - but I think my mistake this time was doing them with a resistance that was too hard. I think I ended up having to really power through the downstroke to maintain cadence, but was unable to maintain that power and speed throughout the whole cycle. With a lower resistance, hopefully I'll be able to keep the motion more even throughout the entire cycle. Ultimately I'd like to be smoother throughout the whole cycle with resistance, but at first I think the main objective is going to be more about training the muscles how/when to fire in a coordinated effort - and then once they learn that, then I can try to have them generate more power.
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