2 FER!

I didn't get anything posted yesterday, so today is a 2 for one!

The weekend came back out to get me again - I never weighed yesterday, but I felt heavier. Yuck. Did really good on Saturday again, and then Sunday let things slide a bit.

Yeterday I did my first T-max interval session. I just used the one that John and I created last year. To be honest, I didn't find it that tough. Time to re-test and recreate it. Friday might be a good day for that.

For those who are not familiar with T-max, here's the story. T-max is defined as the maximum amount of time that you can hold your peak power output without succcumbing to exhaustion. (Get out the puke-buckets folks! This one's gonna hurt!)

To create the T-max interval:

1) Determine Your Peak Power Output. Using a power-measuring device from PowerTap, Polar, SRM or CompuTrainer, begin riding at 100 watts. Increase power by 30 watts every minute until you reach exhaustion. Laursen deemed test subjects fully exhausted when they could not keep their cadence above 60 rpm. You can use that benchmark, but let's be honest, you'll know when you're done. The number of watts you produce just before collapsing is your peak power output, or PPO.

2) Find Your T-Max. Rest for a day or two. Again using a power meter, ride at your PPO until you can no longer sustain that level of output. The amount of time you can hold your PPO is your T-Max. For most of us, that's between four and six minutes.

3) Calculate Your Ultimate Interval. Multiply your T-Max time by 0.6. This is the work phase of your interval. Double the work phase to set your recovery time between efforts.

That's it! So what I was doing wasn't exactly a full T-max - 'cause when we set it up I couldn't do it. I'm going to run the test again, and see where it puts me. Yesterday I did 6 intervals. Each interval was 2:30 long at 320 watts with a 5 minutes recovery in between (spinning at 125 watts.)

Friday will be the stage one of the test - warm up good (about 20 minutes) and then do the test. I'll keep a puke bucket close by so my wife doesn't have a mess to clean up.

Saturday will be recovery ride, Sunday completely off, and the Monday the second part of the test - riding at max PPO for as long as possible. Then I'll rebuild the program.

For the whole skinny on T-max intervals, you can read all about it at the Bicycling web site: http://www.bicycling.com/article/0,6610,s-4-41-16493-1,00.html

Today I did a hard ITT on the imn_thirty course. I managaed to average 219 watts and finished the course in just over 52 minutes. Definitely improvement!

Food today, so far, has been excellent. More control over evening eating (Khan was late coming in last night and I stayed up with him and ended up eating a bit of crap-food.)

My weight had jumped up a couple of pounds since Saturday's weigh in. Must continue to work - this week I must be below 188 by Friday.