Mostly Hill Sprints

A day late, pouring rain, and didn't quite have time to do the lot so had to finish on the trainer at home. A slightly imperfect training session! But I got it done at least.

Uphill sprints this week felt a little better than last week, and though I was supposed to do them 'on the five' I was actually getting back in 3-4 minutes - and given the rain, wind and cold, I wasn't hanging around for the 5 minutes to roll around!

i) 74/27.7 (?)
ii) 75/27.6 (30.0)
iii) 78/28.3 (30.3)
iv) 76/27.8 (29.3)
v) 75/25.7 (29.4)

So quite a consistent set of results, much more so than last week. The slight speed discrepancy on the last result is probably because, although strava reports cadence and speed for each second, there's bound to be some lag, and I'm taking figures from the point of highest cadence (since when I get to the mark, I stop pedalling hard, in part to make it easier to analyse afterwards) and speed continues to increase for a second or two afterwards. All of this was in 53x17.

The one downhill sprint I managed to fit in had a similar profile to last week:

Entry: 114/56.1, Max 123/58.1(59.0)

Because of the weather, however, it's hard to compare too precisely - I had a tailwind for the uphill sprints, and a headwind for the downhill sprint of a good 30km/hr or so, plus the rain and so on. Still, good to do. Then I got home and did 4 X 8s PG sprints (110):5 in an attempt to roughly replicate the downhill sprints. Even in 53x25 it was a bit difficult to hold 120RPM as an entry cadence without taking too much away from the sprint, so I tended to go with about 110 as a target. The 4 sprints in 53x17 gave max cadences of 142, 147, 140 and 140. Which, really, doesn't mean much, but it's something to record, anyway!

Overall I felt quite good with the training today, despite (because of?) the rain and wind and cold. fairly strong and fresh, head felt fairly screwed on properly, and I felt like I was doing something worthwhile. Which makes training much more enjoyable and aggressive!

Brief stats here and here.