When "yeah" means "ouch" (and vice versa)

I spoke about the tests and challenges that Alan has given me as part of the training. Two of the difficult and long ones are the 2 and a half hour bike challenge and the 5 hour bike challenge. Basically ride as hard as you can sustain for that time and see where it takes you. This helps us see if the training is working as planned - improving the power output over long time periods. Sounds tough and turns out it is.

Luckily Alan gave me a target for the 2.5 hour challenge to help pacing - 328 watt (normalized). That's 23 watts more than my best half Ironman bike, so hard. Nice enough he said "sustained climb", which would be fine if you are next to a really really long mountain, but here in Mallorca that doesn't exist. So I mapped out a route that was flat to rolling for the first hour and a half and then headed into the mountains.

It's a bit weird to do these things, because they don't feel that hard initially, but get worse as time goes on. I started out 10 watts above target and immediately my heart rate shot up to about 150, which is super high for me. I thought - yeah, I can hold this for an hour without too many problems, but then??

Turns out you can cheat your mind quite well and set ever new goals and targets. After the first 30 minutes I was still 10 watts over and told myself "it doesn't hurt that much yet, so it must be ok." After 1:15 it was "half way there" and the power was still on. When I hit the climb it was "well now it's easier to produce power than on the flat."

The test turned out pretty well at 335 watt (normalized), and a few more watts were possible, but there was a little traffic in the mountains. After the ride I find, though, that I'm toast and will need a big sleep tonight.

Sometimes a little "yeah" needs a lot of "ouch" :-).