It was a beautiful ride this morning. Temperature was comfortable and pretty much no wind or clouds in sight. I was able to sneak out without waking the dogs up but was still able to make my cup of joe.

We will be leaving Tubac on Saturday and I will miss this sleepy little town. The RV park we have been staying at is anything but a normal RV park. It is much closer to a hippie commune with irregularly placed camping sites and bird feeders liberally placed throughout. The nearby roads are a bit rough but quiet and with enough varying grades to build nice workouts around.

Today’s Workout Details:

One of the challenges for mountain biking over road cycling is that the terrain is widely varying. Besides a lot of ups and downs there are also varying sizes of rocks, roots, and other obstacles to rode over. This requires short bursts of intense power to ride through smoothly.

To train for this type of riding regular intervals are not enough. While intervals help raise your ability to ride with a sustained heart rate or power they don’t necessarily help build the specific strength needed to have short bursts of power.

Enter the force reps workout. While similar to an interval workout force reps are more similar to weight lifting where a short burst of energy is used to move something heavy. In this case the short burst is 10 pedal strokes and the heavy thing is being in a large gear.