Tuesday track and Wednesday commute

Posted by Rachel

Now I realize why we don't usually blog about training... it appears that's not what our audience likes to read about. It must be our hilarious race reports and witty, charming story telling that really lures them in. Nonetheless, I promised that I would cover my actual training for a week, so here it goes.

Tuesday:
Track workout: 4 x (800 interval pace, jog to bottom of track (~80m), stair repeats back to the 'top' of the track, 200 interval pace, 200 recovery). Normally I'm highly opposed to things that aren't running occurring during my track workout, but I figure anything that will help make my quads become gigantic (like stairs) may help my biking. So I went for it. I'm not sure if it really did much except make the track workout really hard, but I guess that's ok. 6.1 miles logged total, 2.5 at interval pace (~6:15 mile).

Wednesday:
This is the day we bike commute from Pleasanton to Oakland. It is 30 miles w/ 2400 ft of climbing, so it's a solid workout. There is a net 200 ft elevation loss, but since the commute is in the west direction and the wind is generally 15 mph from the west, I think the verdict is that it's a challenging bike ride. Today I focused on the back half of my pedal stroke (the part where you pull your heel up) and it really helped increase my cadence. I knew swimming and running had a 'proper form', but I never really think about biking efficiency much so now seems like a good time to start. It's really hard to compare pace week to week because the biggest variables are headwind and stoplights so I'm not sure if it actually helped my speed or not (today was 14.0 mph which is right in the normal range for this ride). We'll see. The other thing I'm working on is controlling my bike on downhills and turns... still a long way to go there.



Only 2 more training entries to go for the week. I'll include some pictures in the next one.