6x4x4 Bike Ride

A friend had suggested this workout a couple weeks ago, but for a variety of reasons (not the least of which was my 4 day mental vacation this week) I hadn't gotten around to it.  But after all of the inspiration of yesterday's championships and the continued gorgeous weather here in central Missouri, I made sure there were no excuses today.  Although I have to admit, that this:

made me briefly think about one excuse.  Note how nearly straight out that flag is flying.  Note all of the sunshine and hardly any clouds.  The good news was that it was in the 70s for temps and the humidity is about 40%.  The kids were happily left at home so it was just me and my bike. 

I started out with a nice easy warm up for about 10 min, then I attempted to do 6 "hard" minutes followed by 4 "easy" minutes, 4 times with a pretty easy 10 min or so cool down.  Part of the purpose of this is to get a better feel for "hard" versus "easy".  What I found was that I couldn't really get to "hard" on the flat topography.  I could only get up to "medium" by up'ing the cadence and switching to harder gears.  So I added some hills to try to get in enough "hard" - and boy, I could feel "hard" deep in my lungs.  But it was hard to stick exactly with the 6x4 plan because sometimes you'd hit a downhill during a hard section or you'd be finishing a hill on an easy section.  So I went a little longer trying to get it somewhere close.  I rode about 1 hr 12 min (including warmup/cool down) which was a little over 12.5 miles. 

Oh, and as for that flag - I definitely could feel the 10 mph E-SE wind in my face on parts of my loops (I was never more than about 3 miles from home on mostly an E-W route).  It kind of sucked!  But thankfully it jived fairly well with the "hard" sections.

Tomorrow I have to meet my surveyor friend in the morning in Columbia to help him with a flood elevation certificate so that means it will be "swim" day.  Yay!