Fitted some new
handlebars to the bike this weekend. I don't want to spend any money on getting the bike race ready except for tyres and the barest safety essentials. The old bars were 7 years old and I'm not ready for searing intestinal / gonadal injury just yet.
My offroad training course is 2.6 miles and I'm going around it in about 13 minutes at the moment.. Although I'm knackered after this effort it still feels quite slow. It's got a good mix of fast sections (tarmac), deep effort sucking sand, mud, leaves, gates and hills which I carry the bike up. As I don't have a heart rate monitor I'm not sure how my effort really compares to my interval work in the gym, but I feel quite bad - much along the lines of how jpearl suggested I should feel
. I feel also that I could keep that up for 40 minutes, in fact I think I might be prepared to suffer slightly more on race day.
It's difficult to get out and ride the bike a lot more due to light conditions during the week, and more recently very cold weather/ice. I could ride to work, but it's all tarmac (I suppose I could 'cross it up a bit on singletrack tarmac 'pavements' which sometimes run along the route). I've contemplated doing sprints on the way in (12 miles) and just riding back slowly on the way back (another 12 miles) - this is how I generally ride anyway.
I tried descending on the drops and that scared me even more! I think I'll be using my top mount levers for the steep stuff - they feel really good.
Measured my RHR at 51 today, but still not seen a MHR of over 180. According to the simple formula of 15.3 *(MHR/RHR) = V02max that gives me a guessimated V02max of 53. I have no idea if that's good