Oh That Fickle Weather…

The past few days have been beautiful here. High’s in the mid to high 60′s and sunny. Gorgeous. I saw it through my windows as I worked. Busy busy. So, like “yay”, it’s weekend now, right? OK. Day started reasonable in the mid-40′s and quickly devolved into yucky rain and snow. Blech. Fortunately I got my run in early before the precipitation started. Piddly 2 hour run. Ha ha- piddly. After those long trail runs, it didn’t seem like no big deal.

I’ve been looking forward to actually riding my triathlon bike off the trainer since I have a little training du next weekend. Sure would like to make sure I remember how to drive in my aerobars before I try to race in them. Not that it will be a fast race. We used to have a Sanford Run/Bike series around here where some of us would come out and force our bodies into race efforts to shake out the cobwebs before anything more important rolls around. The Sanford races went away when the sponsoring bike shop changed ownership, so a Greensboro group called OffnRunning Sports filled the gap with a couple of February Winter Du’s. First one would have been too much in combination with the Run for the Roses 5k the same weekend.

So where am I going with this? Tomorrow, the precip stops, but we’re left with temp’s maybe rising to 40. That’s kind of tough to take for a long ride. I had planned to ride with team mate Jeanna, but she doesn’t have the cold weather gear. Not a good plan in near-freezing temps.

So I’ve developed an alternative plan. Bundle up, go out and ride for a little while or as long as I can handle, then load the bike onto the trainer on my back porch and proceed with an moderate intensity interval workout I was going to implement into the training plan in a couple weeks. I came up with the plan based on something similar someone proposed on a triathlon forum and my first pass at it will go something like this: 10 min warmup, 3×5 min @ HR around 150 bpm / 160 bpm / 140 bpm / repeat, then 5 min warmdown for a total workout time of 1 hour. HR’s based on 20 min power test w/ avg HR at 177.

Worth noting that I rarely train with a HR monitor, but typically use perceived effort to guide me in training & races, but since I don’t have one of those expensive powermeters, the tool is helpful for more structured interval work on the trainer. Then maybe a short run. We’ll see how it goes. I ‘ll report on it tomorrow.

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