Originally Posted by
Grotug
Thanks for the reply Matty! I will check out that podcast. So what do 3-minute VO2 Max intervals feel like? How do those intervals feel different than before you got the power meter and started training correctly?
Caloso: Slow.
According to Strava my last ride took 18:32 to do the meat of the climb which is 2.6 miles and 764 ft of elev gain for 5.5% average gradient (max gradient is 10.6%). Avg speed was 8.7mph and 187 watts.
[MENTION=349708]firebird[/MENTION]: good thing I copy and pasted that! I read it as everlasting challenge. Interesting that the majority of those who attempted it were in England; I guess they are starving for hills there.
I found a good strava blog about it, but not sure if I'm allowed to link to it?
I'd only have to climb the main part of the climb of my local hill precisely 38 times
. Let's say it takes 4:30 to ride down the hill. 18:30 + 4:30 = 23 minutes for each lap. 38 X 23 min = 14.6 hours. Totally doable. XD Dang, that's a total of 197.6 miles. Most I've ever done in a single ride is 62 and that was the last ride I did before my bike got stolen 9 years ago. I dunno; by the end of the summer I could probably do that portion of the climb ten times in a day, but 38? Crazy. I wonder what the ideal gradient is for such a feat.
2x20' at 85-95% of FTP is a solid sweet spot work out, so this hill is tailor-made for this workout, even without a powermeter. You ride hard but not so hard that you can't repeat it. You're not trying for a
PR, but just a notch below that. You can do a sweet spot workout 3 or 4 times a week. After several weeks of making sweet spot your bread and butter, your times up the hill improve, and you can start mixing in shorter, harder intervals like 3'+3' VO2max or 5(5'+1') superthreshold workouts.