TR Gayley workout - 2/9/12

This workout ended up being a bonus and expected workout.

I was travelling this week from Monday evening and due to return Friday morning at 12:30am - however I managed to get a flight out of Atlanta four hours earlier than planned, so I was able get home for 10pm and squeeze in a quick bike workout.  This actually set me up nicely for my workouts the entire weekend - due to the limited amount of time I had, I was having a hard time choosing what combination of workouts to go with:  a potential mid-day Friday 6 mile run, a weekend half marathon pace run of 10-11 miles, my strength training workout, yoga, and cycling workouts.  By being able to get the cycling workout in on Thursday evening, I was then able to go to Yoga on Friday evening (which is something I was feeling I sorely needed), I could do the half marathon pace run on Saturday, and then on Sunday I could do the strength training and possibly also the next cycling workout.  The mid-day Friday run was low priority as I had already run twice this past week, and I felt like the HM pace run was more important with the upcoming half marathon race next weekend.

So the trainerroad Gayley workout is a simple warmup followed by 4 x 8 minute intervals at FTP (since I've decided to throw my trust into the benefits of power-based cycling workouts).  Based on the 8-minute test workout from last weekend, this FTP value ended up being about 220W with my setup.  The initial spinning and warmup seemed too easy, but I stayed with the suggested power output.  Given that I was generally feeling rather tight throughout the whole week (and thus the real need for yoga), I was just as happy to do some low intensity spinning to make sure I was warming up gently enough.  The first interval seemed trivially easy initially, but about six minutes into it with the HR getting into the high 130's and still climbing, I knew that subsequent intervals would be perfectly adequate for base building.

For the most part, the intervals ended with my HR in the mid-high 140's for a couple minutes.  The biggest complaint I have with the workout is that it ends rather suddenly, with only a minute of cooldown after the last interval.  Instead of ending there, I just did a couple 1 minute long high cadence (~130) low gear spins - I find that this brings the HR up to the 140's nicely for a blood flush, but because it is at minimal resistance, there is no significant additional muscle fatigue.  It occured to me that this might be a possible strategy to help with transition from bike to run in the future - during the last mile or so of the bike leg in a triathlon, I could spin at high cadence a bit to help refresh the legs.  At some point I'll have to give it a test.