Things Go Better with Coke

Got on my bike today and it was a completely different story than on Tuesday.

The plan was to repeat the Tuesday workout, only do it with a few more watts:

15' wup, 3' su, 9' Z3, 3x10' (2') FT, cd 5', 10 x 30/30's, cd 4'

During the warmup, I was hitting good watts in an easy gear (meaning the Force was with me!), so I had high hopes for the FT stuff. I also drank about 12 oz. of Coke right before I started. Whereas the Coke seemed to bother me a bit yesterday before I ran (or was that bananas too close to run time?), there were no issues with it today.

When I began the first FT interval, I intentionally took it a little easy for the first minute or so. And then I just tucked in and was going. The effort didn't feel too bad (it never feels great, trust me), I was holding good cadence, and mentally I wasn't struggling like I had on Tuesday. So when I got to 10', I figured let's keep going, and I hung out at FT for 15'. AWESOME! See, I am supposed to do a 2x20' FT test in 2 weeks, and I was thinking I wouldn't be able to do it, but it looks like I'm reacclimating to the hard trainer work (this stuff isn't so hard outdoors, trust me).

I took my 2' of rest, and then started on the 2nd FT interval. Since I had already knocked off 15', I gave myself the option to make this interval shorter, but then I figured I should go at least for 10' to meet the stated workout duration. When I got to 10', I felt like I had more gas left, so I hung in for another 5', and it was good! I finished up with 2 extra 30/30's, so the final workout ended up like this:

15' wup, 3' su, 9' Z3, 2x15' (2') FT, cd 5', 12 x 30/30's, cd 4'

I feel like I'll be able to do that FT test in 2 weeks, and now I know to expect to perform like crap next Tuesday because of all the running I'm doing. BUT, I'm taking Monday off from work, so that might help. And I might get back on the Ultra Violence for that workout. I definitely intend to use it for the FT test workout.

I'm not exceeding my FT wattage that I tested at back in late August, but I wasn't expecting to. My "get faster on the bike" training begins in January after Goofy Challenge. While I made significant progress last year at this time on the bike, I'm at a good output level right now, and will be quite happy to maintain where I am through January, but move things up by March.

Tomorrow is a relatively easy day--I'll swim about 2700 yards and run for an hour--depending on how I feel, the running will be easy to steady or maybe upper steady. We shall see. I don't want to push it too far so I'm "rested" for the weekend festival.