Tuesday, 01 June 2010
Working on sustained power in hill climbing. Legs were still tired from the heavy consecutive workouts on Sunday and Monday. Climbed up from Bourg to Chapieux – which is half way up the Cormet de Roselend.
The SportTracks (www.zonefivesoftware.com) software, using the “training load” plugin, shows that short high intensity workouts, while maintaining fitness levels, permits fatigue levels to recover. This seems the best approach to prepare for the big race at the weekend. If you do no training then you drop in fitness level as well as fatigue level – which is not so helpful in the long run – especially when your objective is not to win races but for general health and fitness.
Used the Virtual Partner on the Garmin Forerunner 305 on this session for the first time ever. It’s a fantastic tool. I had stored my previous climb up to the Cormet as a “course” so that makes it possible to race against it directly – with all the previous time data as reference. It does an automatic start as you go pas the start point – and it straight away told me that I was 45m behind so I had to go like the clappers to catch “myself” up. Eventually I got 50m ahead then the GPS dropped out when I was in a long gorge. Coming out of the gorge I was horrified to see that I was now 70m behind – with the big climb just coming up. Working like a dog I made ground to about 48m behind then the whole system went daft. It turns out that on the original climb that was stored as the course the GPS had dropped out during recording and the data was a mess. This is certainly a great way to motivate a good training performance but the lesson is to make sure that courses are only generated from good data. The Garmin Forerunner 305 is a phenomenally good piece of kit – extremely light and cheap to buy on www.amazon.co.uk