After yesterdays six miles at lunch, and intervals on the trainer in the evening, I wanted a workout today that would not be terribly taxing. Especially with a 17 mile long run coming up this weekend. So I did a simple and straight forward steady state trainer spin with a target HR between 140-145.
Unlike the past couple trainer workouts, this one I wanted to hit a cadence of 90 rpm as close as possible - at least during the real workout portion. I did a two step warm up - 5 minutes at 34x19, followed by 5 minutes @ 34x16, represented by the two plateaus in the HR graph. I then went to 34x14, and found the HR settling into the 140's around the 25 minute mark. Figuring it would probably climb a bit over time, I kept the gears at that spot, aiming for the proper cadence, and kept spinning for about 70 minutes. As anticipated, the HR did increase slightly, the cadence decreased slightly, as did the speed. However, the dropoff was real minimal, so I'm pretty happy about it.
Following that, it was about five minutes of cool down spin.
One thing of note is that I did continue to toy around with efficiency during the cycle. Having been through a couple sessions now of OLD's on each leg, I did feel like I could start to tell when the leg muscles were firing appropriately for the position around the cycle. Prior to doing the OLD's, I had no idea what it felt like - so as of this point in time, even if the OLD's haven't yet helped with actual efficiency or power, they do appear to be helping with knowing when it starts to 'feel right'. Or, maybe 'right' is too aggressive at this stage of the game. Maybe it should be more like 'not feel quite so wrong'.
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