Today was back on the bike with 4 sets of 6 minute intervals. During the intervals the goal is to have my heart rate in the Zone 4: SubThreshold range. This zone is 94% to 99% of Lactic Threshold Heart Rate. So you are pushing hard but not all out, that is for Zone 5.
Before getting into the intervals it is important to have a good warm up. This helps ensure a good effort and reduces the chances of injury. For my warm up I prefer to ride on the highway and I can stay smooth and consistent. I try to finish my warm up back at home so I can do the intervals on my trails.
As I wrote before being able to ride my workouts on my trails is like a dream. First of all I am riding on single track which is one of my most favorite things. Second it is a closed trail so I don’t have to worry about anyone else being on the trail, well except for my wife. Third I am at home so if I need to take a restroom break or something I can. Finally when I am done riding I am already at home and can quickly start cleaning up and getting ready for work.
Last time I did intervals on my trails I was coming up a bit short of the 6 minutes. So today I added the Kiss of Cactus and Drop Trow to my Fenceline loop and created a 1 mile loop. This takes me about 5 min 30 seconds to complete at a Zone 4 pace which is close enough to 6 minutes.
After an interval I recover for 3 minutes at Zone 1. I just drop into a low gear and pedal softly around the trails until it is time to go again. After I finished the intervals I had some time to cool down so I rode up the highway for a bit.
For my 1 hour 15 minute ride I covered 14 miles and 827 feet of climbing. The weather was perfect and the sun was shining. Doesn’t get much better than that. After the ride I did 4 sets of 5 burpee reps for my part in the August burpee challenge. Those are still really hard.
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