that was a hard session

Team4Luke

26mph north westerly winds for me today, 12mph against it at times. Anyway, 102minutes at mid level 2, well tried to stay at that but against the wind impossible would have been doing 5mph, 55 miles in total and completely out of my tree, just got home crawling mode for the recovery 12 mile road home.

Ouija

Know what you mean. Road 30m into the same wind going out to Helmsley from Scarborough. Practically dead on my bike by the time i got there. Coming back was a complete blast however . Spent most of it in my top gear zooming along at 31 to 35mph. Still knackered though.

Pseudonym

Team4Luke wrote:

Anyway, 102minutes at mid level 2, well tried to stay at that but against the wind impossible would have been doing 5mph,

bit confused by this...

if you were in L2, presumably you were using an HRM - in which case it should be easy to stay at L2 no matter where you are - simply moderate your effort and ignore your speed. L2 should not mean riding at 5mph into a 26mph headwind - unless you are seriously unfit.....

Anyway, 55 miles in 102 minutes is an average speed of 32mph, which is either pretty impressive - or just plain wrong.

Team4Luke

yes always train to HR. Yes could easily moderate my effort but as I said straight into the headwind I would have had to go extremely slow and am not prepared to ride at single figures mph so just maintained the same physical feeling and let the HR go up. Depends on what I want from the session, others I will be very rigid with it, but today happy to let it do what it wants, nope I am not seriously unfit. I'm building up to 2hrs riding at 150-160ish and maintaining around 155bpm as much as possible, today was a move in right direction with the longest time spent in zone, very close now to having a crack at 2hrs. Session was 12mile ride to start point, 31miles training and 12miles back home, given I rode out in zone as well, did session, rode back on extremely tired legs still in zone mostly this was a massive session, in fact download now shows 2hrs 30mins total spent at mid and upper L2 on my winter bike. 17.7mph ave for the 31 miles which I am very happy with. Looking at doing a 50TT so building my engine up, this sort of training puts me under 2hrs for a 50TT.

SBezza

I wouldn't aim to maintain a given HR, if you maintain 155 for the duration of the ride, your actual power might be going down, aim to stay within a range instead. It doesn't matter if it does drift out, like you say travelling stupidly slowly into a headwind is pointless, if not a tad dangerous, depending on what sort of road you are on.

Mid zone 2 ( and I am assuming endurance here rather than tempo) should never be that tiring unless you are unfit, especially for such a short duration, for zone 2 I would use the whole of the ride, no point riding 12 miles to start it, it isn't a level that needs warming up for, just get on the bike and start riding.

To go under 2 hours for a 50 mile TT, I would suggest you being able to do 50 miles quite comfortably at zone 3 (tempo), though you have to start somewhere. I am sure if you keep it up it shouldn't be a problem for you.