Smooth bike drills

Tonight was a short but hard workout, 45 minutes or so of very smooth cycling drills with speed intervals thrown in. The new plan is to put as much power into the up stroke as the down stroke, producing an even hum. The new technique works certain muscles harder than before.

Setback

Tuesday evening (March 13; I won’t remark on the number!) I had my first swimming lesson since my knee surgery.

I felt great. It wasn’t just the joy of working out; it was that my kicking felt so much better. My vertical kick, never that bad, was suddenly better. With better kicking (as any fan of Terry Laughlin’s Total Immersion technique knows) comes better body positioning which means better (or at least easier) swimming. (See the Wikipedia article on TI for a good summary of the criticisms of TI.)

About midway through our hour my knee began to hurt, and we switched to drills using a pullbuoy. But it was too late; after a week of wonderful recovery, my knee has been sore since. I took a couple of days off, and since then I’ve resumed light cycling. Yesterday I did another session of Coach Kelvin’s Triathlete Swim Training but only for half an hour. For one thing, trying to do stroke drills with a pullbuoy is (for me) nothing less than comical. I’ve also been babying the knee, spending hours each day alternating heat and cold.

I biked easily 40 minutes today (watching the last two stages of the 2004 Giro d’Italia on DVD). I think I’ll do an hour tomorrow, and then I fly to Los Angeles for a week of meetings with my client.

The week in Los Angeles I’ll be staying at the Doubletree Hotel Carson Civic Plaza (sic), whose pool I’ve described before. But an alternative to the Doubletree’s modest facilities is a brand-new 24 Hour Fitness facility about a mile from the hotel. The building looked great from the outside in January, but its home page doesn’t mention the pool I thought it had. Anyway, my plan is to swim a bit, pool-run a bit, walk a bit, and maybe even *gasp* run a bit. As with so much: We’ll see.

Back in the saddle …

First, an apology for using a cliché as my title; I couldn’t think of anything else.

Second, the pic is also just the best I could find. I’m not female, I don’t have long hair, and I was riding my old Trek 2200 (a diamond-frame road bike) on a Tacx Flow ergotrainer, but …

for the first time in six days, I worked out. And, to my pleasant surprise, my refurbished knee didn’t complain; indeed, it liked it!

Forza, Emanuele!

Did my bike work-out on the trainer, continuing to watch the DVD of the 2004 Giro d’Italia. I’ve not enjoyed the abridged Giro coverage as much as the four-hour-per-stage live coverage (as I noted a couple of days ago), but today I watched Emanuele Sella take his first win as a pro on the 11th stage (in Pantani’s hometown of Cesena), and it was exciting and inspiring. I couldn’t find any English-language sites on him, but you can visit his fan club here.

One amusing thing about watching a bike race while I work out on a trainer is that when the cyclists are doing tight corners I lean with them! Could be a bit scary, if I leaned too much!

The work-out was ok. Coach Steve asked me to “Cycle speed - 60" total with 2 x 10" tempo (4"R I)”. I did a very, very easy 15-min warm-up, then worked hard for 10 min, then did a 5-min rest interval (just so the times were even), did another 10 min hard, and a final 20 min easy.

The first interval was awful. My legs, particularly my thighs, were screaming. I wondered what Alison had done to me. And I couldn’t get my HR into the tempo territory of high 130s and low 140s. Indeed, I don’t think it ever went over 125. But the second interval was completely different—power over 200 W, HR well into the 140s, and my legs didn’t hurt.

I wondered if my warm-up was too easy.