I'll get onto today's dramatic training activities in a bit, but Monday is body composition stats day, so here they are:
Weight: 11 stone 10 pounds (same as last week)
Body Fat: 20.7% (up marginally)
Visceral Fat Rating: 7 (same as last week)
Basal Metabolic Rate: 7192 kJ/1719 kcal (up a bit - that's good I think)
Muscle Mass: 8 stone 11 pounds 6 ounces (same)
Water: 55.5%
There aren't actually many conclusions to be drawn, as I didn't actually do much in the way of training last week, so nothing's really changed. I'll be doing a lot more training this week, so I'll be hoping to see a much bigger difference.
Annoyingly, the weather has been great the last ten days or so, but it's supposed to take a distinct turn for the worse this week. I'm going to have to work my training very much around that.
Today, for most of the morning, it was very windy, but not actually too cold. I knew the wind would be pretty hard work, but I thought that it would still be worth giving it a go. I'd downloaded a few routes from Bikely to my Garmin, and thought I'd give one of those a whirl. I decided on a route down to Cobham/Leatherhead and back.
After my physiological testing last week, I'd worked out a training programme tailored to my work schedule. The suggested training for today was a 60-120 minute ride at "Endurance" Heart Rate - ie. 142-152 bpm. I set my Garmin to give me me alerts whenever my heart rate stepped outside of that zone and then set off.
Unfortunately, the route finding side of my Garmin started going a bit haywire - I think because I hadn't started from the exact starting point of the downloaded route, so I eventually decided to just ride wherever my wheels took me. As the point of the training was just to keep my heart rate in the Endurance zone, then it didn't really matter exactly where I went. I also knew that I had the safety net of the "Go Home" function on my Garmin to get me back too.
As I'd expected, the wind was pretty stiff, but as I was only worried about my heart rate rather than absolute speed, that wasn't a problem. It was actually quite hard to keep myself in the right HR zone, because it didn't always feel like I was putting "enough" effort in. With training, you
always feel like you should be pushing yourself to your limits, but I know now that that's not necessarily all that useful in the long run. Having said that, you can see from the graph that I did ok...most of the stuff in the lower heart rate zone was on my way home, when I was wet and miserable and it was difficult to get much speed up because the roads were wet. The really key thing is to keep out of the upper "mixed muscle" zone too much, and I achieved that pretty well. The beeping of my heart rate alerts definitely helped.
I ended up taking a fairly similar route to the one I'd planned anyway, and ended up in Stoke d'Abernon. I stopped for 5 minutes and had a Go Bar and something to drink, but as I did the weather started closing in a bit. I thought I'd better head home as soon as I could, but after I'd been back on my bike for a couple of minutes, suddenly the wind whipped up and hail started flying into my face. I was instantly soaked, but luckily I quickly came across a petrol station, and I pulled in to shelter under their awning.
I had to wait 15 mins or so, and the rain hadn't even got close to stopping, but I was getting cold and I figured the important thing was just to get home. It was a pretty miserable 10 or 15 miles home...my legs were cold, and my feet were wet and freezing...but I got home eventually.
In the end, I'm glad I went out, cos it was a couple of hours training that I wouldn't otherwise have got and it was reassuring that I managed to get through it all right.
The weather's supposed to be a bit better tomorrow, so I'll try and do my threshold training tomorrow up in Richmond Park. I'm supposed to do a 15-20 minute Time Trial session at higher heart rates, so one lap of the park is probably a good way of doing it. It'll be important to get out tomorrow, because it might not be possible for the rest of the week.
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