Training with power

I love my power meter. Tonight I did my first real power based workout. I've done a few recovery workouts that were power based, but I would say they were more cadence based than anything. But tonight I really put my power meter to use and it was great.

I did the Spinervals Timetrialapalooza workout. It's a pretty simple but effective workout. You start with a warm up, then do a 20 minute time trial, followed by a 5 minute recovery. Then 15 minute TT, 5 minute recovery, 10 minute TT, 5 minute recovery, 5 minute TT, cool down. The trick is that you're supposed to increase your power with each interval and drop your cadence a bit.

I did this workout last winter, but started too hard and died by the last 5 minute TT. But tonight I used my power meter and paced myself and nailed the workout. The only thing I came up short on was cadence. I need to work on higher cadences. I'm struggling to put out decent power at a cadence over 91 right now so I didn't hit the 95 cadence goal for the 20 minute TT.

I also learned a little about warming up tonight. I've realized that I didn't warm up enough at the Indoor TT at SBR a few weeks ago. I was afraid of going hard in my warm up for fear of burning out. But it doesn't really work like that. You need to push hard for a little while in your warm up to blow out the carbon (to use a car analogy) and get your legs ready for the open road. Tonight I was a little sluggish in my first TT, but felt much better in the following 3 TTs because my legs were warmed up and ready to go. The second Indoor TT at SBR is this Saturday so I think I'm going to go into this one with a better warm up plan and see if that helps.

I had physical therapy this morning, and he told my knee is healing well and that I should cancel the rest of my appointments. He said my goal now is to continue increasing my running mileage slowly while keeping the intensity within reason and I should be fine. That was really encouraging. My knee has been feeling really good lately, but to have someone else confirm that it's finally healing was good to hear.