Training Log Archive: iansmith

Today's objective was to go hard and fast on a long ride, but my choice of distance was a more reasonable 120 km to Burlington and Spencer Smith Park. It's been a bit of a rough week for me, and it was a glorious morning to be out. I set an apparently unsustainable pace on the out phase and was somewhat burned out on the return.

I set out at 5a in the predawn darkness. Getting from my apartment to the lake shore is not trivial, and there were numerous stoplights. A coyote ran across the street perhaps 30m in front of me into High Park while I was on Parkside.

Once I got to the lake, as traffic was quite light so early, I pushed hard - biking 30 km (from 10 to 40) in 1:00:23 even with a number of stoplights, and 50 km (10 to 60) in 1:40:36. I felt ok to start out. Pushing as hard as I was, it's disappointing that I was not moving faster.

I faded a bit on the return journey - perhaps also inhibited by a light ~10 kph wind blowing from the northeast. There was also considerably more traffic and traffic lights as people started to get up. The last 8 km were necessarily glacial due to Toronto traffic; the effort part of this ride was about 108 km in 3:52. A good effort, but an unremarkable result.

I stopped roughly once per hour - at 0:53 (when I got lost), 2:04, 3:13, and 4:00. I probably should stop more often, but I'm trying to push my endurance. I drank about 2L of gatorade mix at intervals throughout the ride, and I ate a brownie and a candy bar over the course of the stops. No M&Ms today, which surely penalized my performance.

C • Endurance Cycling 3

Very easy effort and my second ride on the York Mills - Victoria Park - O'Connor loop. Between lights and my relaxed effort, I went through the first 5k in a laughable 15:05. But I loosened up quickly, and even while I stayed relaxed, I cruised at 30 kph in places. O'Connor is particularly nice, as it's a quiet road but has long stretches between lights.

Intervals at Memorial Park, a public park with a track that is 2.7 km from my apartment. It is an excellent distance for a good warm up and cool down.

I haven't done track intervals in a while, so I set a conservative workout of 4x200m, 2x400m, 2x200m. I planned to run at a "Repeats" effort from Daniels' Running Formula, with emphasis on running form and kinetics. The bouts would likely be too short to get my heart rate up, and I gave myself long recoveries. The recovery was untimed; for the 200s, I just jogged back to the start of the track, and for the 400s, I had a short little jog along the curve of the track before returning. In all cases, my recoveries worked out to be about 90-100s.

I was ludicrously slow, but that's to be expected given my current fitness. The effort was pleasant. Unfortunately, my relatively new shoes irritated my left achilles somewhat. My splits got a little faster during the workout, which I take as a good sign.

Splits:
200s: 47.9, 42.4, 43.5, 44.7; 41.4, 43.1
400s: 1:39, 1:33