TR - Spanish Needle & Runstreak Day 32 - 4/7/12

A week late on this - sorry about that (whoever you are).

Anyway, on Saturday I did the TrainerRoad Spanish Needle workout, which is six sets of 15 x 15s sprints @ 150% FTP, with 15s of rest @ 50% FTP.  Just look at the link, you'll see what I mean :)
The idea is to make the intervals very intense, but very short, and with short recovery in between.  Of course such short intervals means that time it takes to ramp up is significant, so matching the desired FTP is difficult because it's very easy to overshoot, or slightly undershoot - and with little time to make corrections before the interval is done.  But whatever.. I was really impressed by a couple things:  (1) It kept the HR nice and high, in the 140's and 150's and (2) the timing of the 15s rest intervals was just about perfect, as I'd just start to feel like the muscles were getting over their exertion and within a couple seconds, the next interval was up.  So it made for a solid workout - especially the last couple sets of intervals.

Earlier in the day, I took off on a run to test out the ankle - it had been feeling pretty good with only a real tiny spot of inflammation left.  Things started out pretty well, but after a couple miles, I could tell the inflammation was building and wasn't going to go away.  A little over 3 miles into the run, I decided to turn around and bring it home.  The last couple miles were tough because the pain was rather distracting (not to mention annoying, having been dealing with this the past couple weeks) - my only hope was that I didn't reset myself back a week.

The other effect was that I decided to screw the whole runstreak thing - maybe this wasn't the best of times to attempt it.  I still managed over 30 days straight, which is an accomplishment - but I was too anxious to get healed up and getting frustrated over losing training time on this.  So, with the following week being a week of travel for work, I decided it was just as well.  I had done a lot of bike work this first week of April as a substitution for running, but that would only be effective for so long - it was time to get this sorted out.