Today I had a great ride on the bike. Well, I guess as I was on the windtrainer I should say spin, because technically I didn't ride anywhere, haha.
Todays goal was to be on there for 105 minutes. Actually, that was next Sunday's goal....today's goal was 90 minutes, but I didn't figure that one out till AFTER I'd done the workout. Whoops!
I gradually got my heartrate to where I wanted it to be in the 20 minute warmup. In addition, I managed to get some one legged spins in there as well. Everything felt pretty good until around the midway point of my ride. Then I started to feel my legs.
It's funny, this workout wasn't hard per se, but it wasn't easy either. In saying that it wasn't hard I mean that I didn't have that 'YEOWCH' kind of pain that you can from sprints etc. Actually, it's hard to describe how my legs were feeling. Like they wanted me to back off or wimp out or something, but at the same time it wasn't like I couldn't keep pedalling.....does this make any sense?! haha.
I finally realized this is what it is to 'expand my comfort zone'. Last season, if I were riding outside, I probably would have backed off a bit. Hell, I would have done that on the trainer last year too. In fact, I'm sure I never kept my heartrate up on the trainer....just long easy recovery spins the whole time. Hindsight being what it is, I realize that I didn't do myself any favours! In my defense I didn't actually know what I was doing last year, but I'm learning this year.
I knew if I did that today that it wouldn't help me achieve my goal of sustained power this year. So rather than give in, I kept pedaling. I kept checking my heartrate and if it started to go down (indicating I was getting tired and slacking) then I upped my cadence a bit. In fact, I upped it to over 90 rpm, just to prove a point to myself.
I managed to keep this up the last 35 minutes of the ride, then did my 10 minute cooldown. I was really happy with today's ride. I kept my heartrate up, had great cadence and held it like that. It wasn't easy, but I did it!!! A great mental and physical breaththrough!
Just one more step towards my overall goal. How very cool.
That is SUPER that you could push through, tired legs and all.
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