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The Strava segment that is the core of my new, Go To "Tamarack Sprint" |
A year and a half ago, in my second post from California, I described my Go To ride, a ride I could do without thinking about it so that when my motivation is low, I am more likely to ride. That ride, which I still do frequently, is 23 miles long and has 1300 feet of climbing and takes me just under 2 hours to complete. My name for that ride (which comes from the name of the road at the far end) is the Alpine Ride. Since then, I have developed other Go To rides which I can do depending on my training needs and mood.
My second Go To ride is an evolving ride that I actually started developing before the Alpine ride, a ride I call the Neighborhood Ride. I think this is my first time describing this ride, I assume because it is a ride that is so simple it gets no respect. As it has evolved, however, it is a ride that has become quite valuable. It all began with first ride from my new home in San Carlos, a shakedown ride around my neighborhood (thus the name of the ride) only 2 miles long and was a celebration of being sufficiently unpacked to manage a ride. Over the months, I tried new routes, initially trying to find a comfortable route that took me about 30 minutes, as I had read somewhere that aerobic exercise should last for at least 30 minutes to be medically valuable. Later, I played with the route to get it above 60 minutes so that by doing 5 of these rides a week I could meet my medically mandated 300 minutes of aerobic exercise. I almost always do these rides on my Public Bike. (I describe this bike and why I like it in this post.) This is the current route for this ride:
My third Go To ride, a somewhat flexible set of similar rides, was inspired by the route of the interim Peninsula Bikeway. I describe the basic route for this ride, which again is named for the road (path) at the far end, Stephens Creek, in this post. Again, I usually do this ride on my Public Bike. This route is relatively flat but is long, so I do this one when I want to work on my endurance but don't feel like working too hard.
And now, please welcome my fourth Go To ride, the Tamarack Sprint.
A couple of posts ago, I said:
"I have recently been enjoying riding my 1960 Bianchi Specialissima ... [and] ... there are some stretches of this neighborhood ride a few blocks long where there is less traffic overall and virtually no cross traffic, so these might be places I could enjoy the speed of this beautiful bike and practice sprinting."
The Tamarack Sprint is the short stretch of road I settled on (shown at the top of this post) for this purpose. The workout for which I selected this ride comes from "Intensity Training 2016" by John Hughes [1]. Hughes suggests that a Health and Fitness rider like me might benefit from two different kinds of fast workouts: a VO2max workout (Zone 5b) and Sprint workout (Zone 5c) [2]. These workouts are at a higher level of effort than I reach during my other rides, and so I hoped they might provide me with unique benefits. Here is what these workouts consist of:
- VO2max: Start with 1 to 3 repeats of 1 minute to 2 minute very hard rides separated by 2 minute to 4 minute recovery. Work up to 2 to 4 repeats of 2 minute to 3 minute very hard rides separated by 4 minute to 6 minute recovery.
- Sprint: Start with 1 to 3 repeats of 10 second to 20 second all out sprints separated with recovery periods 5 minutes or longer. Work up to 2 to 4 repeats of 30 second to 40 second all out sprints, keeping the recovery period at 5 minutes or longer.
Why am I doing the VO2max workout and not the Sprint workout? Hughes says that you should work from slower to faster workouts, e.g. starting with the VO2max workout and then working up to the Sprint workout. However, I confess I did not come to it as logically as all that. I was looking for the safest, quietest street in my neighborhood where I could try some sprint workouts, and Tamarack Street seemed promising; a quiet neighborhood street with few cross streets. The first time I rode it as a sprint (this stretch of road is also part of my neighborhood ride), I had not figured out the workout I wanted to do. Part of Tamarack Road is one way, so I have to ride it north to south, and when I do, it is first uphill and then downhill. Racing downhill seemed both unsafe and unproductive, so I rode the uphill portion (2%-4% grade) as fast as I could. When I got home, I found that this was a Strava segment, so there was no effort required by me to track my performance [4]. However, that fixed the length of the "sprint/very hard ride", making it a VO2max workout. Yes, I could create my own Strava segment, but this one is already at the low end of what Strava recommends, so there is really no good way to use Strava to track the shorter, Sprint workout.
If I can't use Strava to track a Sprint workout, how can I do one? In the first place, I could simply not track it, just do a 10 to 20 second sprint every now and then and not worry about it. However, I could not help but wonder, if I wanted to track a Sprint workout, how would I? Just over a year ago, my Garmin cycling computer stopped working, and I decided to simplify my life and just make do with my cell phone and Strava. When I lived in Houston, I did 20 second sprint workouts, and tracked them on my Garmin, so I started to wonder if I should go back to using one. So I looked at my records from Houston to remember how I used my Garmin to track these sprints and to my delight realized that what I tracked was not how long a 20 second sprint lasted, but the highest speed I reached during the sprint (typically at the end.) That is something I may be able to do with Strava. I don't want to go through all the details of how a Garmin and Strava compare in this regard, I think I just need to try it and see how it goes. In any case, I don't feel like I am ready to add this workout yet, but in preparation for the arrival of that day, I am scouting the neighborhood for a safe, flat stretch of road I could use to see just how fast I can make that old Bianchi go.
So how are the VO2max workouts going? It has been interesting. Something I am learning about myself is how important it is that I not overdo my training, my performance suffers much more often from a buildup of fatigue than from a lack of training. I would have thought that three 1 minute sprints would not produce very much fatigue, but I was wrong. In the figure at the top of the post, you will note that my second set of 5 sprints was the slowest. That set was done one week after the first set. In contrast, the third set was done a month after the second, and fourth set was done a month after the third. When I do 1 set of these sprints a month (in the context of 3 to 5 other rides a week), I seem to be improving fairly steadily. However, 1 set a week is too much. Stay tuned to see if I notice any long term benefits from including these rides.
[1] https://www.roadbikerider.com/register/intensity-training-2016
[2] The scale of ride intensities ("speed") I use in this blog runs from Zone 1 through 5a, 5b, and 5c. Zone 1 is an easy ride where I don't push my speed at all. In Zones 2, 3, and 4 I push increasingly hard. All the way through Zone 4, however, I am riding "aerobically", I can supply oxygen to my legs as fast as they can burn it. What defines Zone 5 is crossing that line; riding at Zone 5 can only be done for short periods of time before I have to stop and "catch my breath." It turns out that there is a lot of difference in the impact of riding at the high end of Zone 5 compared to the low end, so Zone 5 has been subdivided into Zones 5a, 5b, and 5c. (Hughes refers to these as Zones 5, 6, and 7.)
[3] In this post, I am using the word "sprint" to refer not only to Hughes "Sprint" workout, but also to the hard part of any set of intervals, e.g. the VO2max workout.
[4] The name of the Strava Segment, shown in the figure at the top of the post, is "Final Sprint." The record for this segment is 33 seconds, a big difference from my sluggish 58 seconds.
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