VO2max Intervals

I spent the morning playing dad so I missed the group ride. The plan today was VO2 intervals so I did about 30min of warmup with a 5min push at threshold to see how the legs felt...which was not great but not bad. Then I headed over to tank hill, my favorite place to do VO2 intervals.

Before I began I was cruising down the hill and hit some large rock...my front tire flatted and since I was going pretty fast I skidded the rear trying to stop. This put a 3" gash through the rubber nearly to the tube in the rear. Since it was holding air I decided to just go ahead and do the workout and if it blew I would call someone for a ride.

The idea behind VO2 intervals is to tax your maximum cardiac capacity...your HR should be near it's max at the end of each interval and your recovery should be a 1:1 ratio (and maintain an intensity between 110 and 120% of FTP)...so for me today it was 5' on/5' off at 320w. I have my PM set to read watts but at minute 3 I usually click over to average watts to make sure I'm on target then I adjust my effort from there. The last 30s is usually all-out but seated.

I do these on tank hill at the Fort...If you go down the hill turn right and at the lowest point in the road turn around and start up from there. 5 minutes takes me to Chestnut Rd. The climb upto 378 on Horrel Hill Rd is also a good place to do these.

I felt pretty good today with these. The first one nearly always sucks, not smooth and the legs kindof seize up from the effort. It got better for #2-4 but the last one was pretty tough to maintain the wattage (so I didn't do the 6th I was kindof hoping to do). Still 25min at VO2max is a pretty good day of training.

Ahhhh the beauty of intervals (hash at 318w):