Sprint, Hyperventilate, Repeat.......

Let me preface this by saying I love riding my bike......Intervals Suck!!!!!!!! Yes, they are a staple of a racer's workout but they can make a perfectly happy man insane. The last two days have been pretty brutal as I did a day of Power Intervals on Tuesday and Descending Intervals last night. There have been lingering thunderstorms in the area the last couple of days and when it's not raining the humidity has been pretty high so the last couple of days have been SweatFest 2006. I swear I've lost a couple gallons of fluid on the last two rides, I've replaced it of course by taking in just as much but when my rides end at 8:00 or 8:30 and I have to drink 2 or 3 bottles of water before bed I am up 2 or 3 times at night to go to the bathroom. Last night I got in a whole hour of sleep before I was up for trip number 1. Trip number 2 was at about 3:30 and then of course I had to go right away this morning when I woke up. I need to be hydrated obviously but I still need sleep as well, I'm pretty tired right now. Oh well. Anyways, the last two days have gone well and I felt really strong during the intervals and my HR recovery between intervals has been really good. I can get my HR up to or very near max at 189-190 and for the short recovery period between intervals it goes down really quick which means that everything is working as it should. If I were sick or overtrained I wouldn't recover as quickly and my HR wouldn't go down so fast. I feel pretty good about that as it shows that my training program is coming along exactly as I want it to and I'm feeling stronger every day. Tonight will be a nice, ordinary ride as I'm only scheduled for 1 hour 15 minutes at Endurance Pace to recover from the last two days. Yeah, 1 hour and 15 minutes is not a lot, but because my workouts are more intense in the next 3 weeks than at any other time this year the volume or duration of my workouts has to decrease. This peaking period will only help me hold my fitness for the 7-10 days of SuperWeek before I start to lose aerobic endurance. After SuperWeek I'll go back to doing some 3-4 hour rides on the weekends to build that back up again. My only other short peak of the year will be the State Crit Championship so I'll have about 2 weeks to do some long rides before peaking again for the race on August 26th. Well, it's nice easy riding the next two days and then the Whitewater race. I'll post results on Saturday after the race. Until then........