80 Miles on the Indoor Trainer Anyone?

As I mentioned in my last post, the winter training season is all about long hours on an indoor trainer and trying to find ways to stay engaged and push hard when you need to. Yesterday’s answer to that was a 130km race after a good 25 minute warm up. I wanted to pace myself and think about the ride as steady endurance ride. So I let the first 4 attacks go and stuck with the main peloton. At about the 20 mile mark, the fifth attack came and about 10 riders joined and so I could no longer resist the urge to race. It took us about an hour to catch the first four sets of attackers and I stuck with the surge thinking the pace would let up once we caught them. Unfortunately the newly combined group decided to keep up the intensity through the rest of the race. With 3 miles to go there were about 10 of us left in the front group and we separated as the top abled bodied sprinters started sprinting at 8 watts/kg and holding. It was an awesome ride and I held just under 3 watts/kilogram for the 3 hour race. Definitely needed to change today’s ride to an easy hour!