Originally Posted by
Wesley36
My TSB is at -14.5 right now, finishing up the second week of a training block. This morning I had a threshold workout on the agenda (to fit it into the family schedule I do pretty much all of my time on the rollers before 6:30am), so I did 20 min as a crisscross threshold interval (starting off the interval at the bottom of Z4, work up to top of Z4 over 2 minutes, then back down for 2 minutes, repeat). Friel prescribes a single interval 20-40 min long, I threw in a second 12 min work interval for fun after a 5 min recovery. Felt hard, but definitely do-able.
Truth be told though, I am thinking that long threshold intervals should not really be that much of a focus for me this season. My past training was for brevets, so producing steady power and pushing up my FTP were the priorities. For this season I think I need to do more work that involves changes of pace, lots of work around threshold, but not necessarily at threshold. Then lots of VO2Max and beyond in my build blocks to work on power at short durations - next season for me is mostly crits and short road races with lots of small climbs (all less than 2km).
If you did a couple of threshold intervals this morning and were fine the other day could have just been a fluke. However if I were you, I would focus more on criss-cross intervals (hard tempo/SST base pace with VO2/anerobic surges). Then you can do some straight up VO2 intervals as you get closer to the race. I find threshold intervals useful for TT's but if you do too many of them (esp if you do them too hard) they can be hard to recover from and not give you as much benefit as doing more work at less intensity.