A Winterish Morning

 

One of the pleasures of living in Iowa is waking up to snow flurries, wind and 10 degrees on the thermometer.  What to do after downing a bowl of oatmeal and a double shot of espresso?  Hop on the bike.  But not outside, not today.  Today is reserved for the rollers.  My setup, an old set of Kreitler Dynolytes, sweat-induced rust pushing through the red paint on the frame, paired with a Headwind fan running off the front roller and a 10 pound weight spinning off the rear drum, this setup has seen me through hundreds of winter hours over the last ten years.  Most of the time, the rollers are reserved for fast cadence recovery spins, but sometimes, like this morning, they need to take the place of a real base-building ride. 

A great resource for figuring out what to do is Dirk Friel's Workouts book.  It's a little binder stuffed with variations of indoor trainer workouts to add some variety to the hours that you should be spending on the rollers if you're one of the poor blokes not living in southern France this winter.  Friel separates the into Endurance, Force, Speed Skills, Muscular Endurance, Anaerobic Endurance, Power and Mixed.    I'll be highlighting a few that I've incorporated into my routine over the last two years.  Oh, and best of all, the pages of the book are sweat proof!

This is low volume week for me.  Typically, I've been doing about 15 hours a week of base work with a spinup thrown in for three weeks and then I'll do a week with half the volume.  These half-volume weeks typically correspond to bouts of tremendously crappy weather where my MWF commutes to work aren't possible.  This frosty morning I'm going to do the strangely named (I'll be riding on rollers afterall) Rolling Hilly workout, E1 in Friel's text (the first exercise of the Endurance section).  I also set up Cycling TV on the ol' computer.  Today's selection is the 2008 Amstel Gold.  My goal is to recognize some of the towns we rode through during our visit in 2007 (our friends live in Rjemerstok). 

The goal of the workout (besides avoiding frostbite) is to develop endurance and hip strength by imitating cadence and pedal force encountered on rollers.  After a 15m warmup where Friel has me spinning, stand, sit and then do single leg work, we get to the meat of the workout.  Two sets.  First set is 6 reps, 2m each.  Each rep is 2m at 70rpm in Zone 2.  The recovery interval is 1m at 100rpm in Zone 1.  After a three minute rest interval between sets, the second set expands the low cadence interval to 3m.

This sounds ridiculously easy, but after the first set I realize that my hip flexors are killing me.  During the three minute rest interval, my legs feel fantastic, smoothly spinning away at 90ish rpm.  The second set finishes me off by the sixth rep.  The workout's a success: an hour has passed and no frostbite.