Face It, Intervals Have A Purpose

I've gotten into a rut recently that I didn't even realize it was happening. With long work hours, I'm generally pretty exhausted by the time I get home. Sometimes I ride to work and back, but that's 18 miles each way. It necessitates getting up by 4:30AM to be ready to go at 7:00AM. Leaving at 5PM to ride home makes for a very long day and the ride home is more a chore than a pleasure. But I digress, again.

I realized that I was just doing long steady state rides and not mixing things up with intervals of any kind. It shows in my riding as I can ride for 5-6 hours at a time and hold a reasonably good constant effort. However, the first hill I get to, I get spit out the back on group rides or if I'm alone I simply go into my comfort zone of lower L4 zone.

A friend in Ohio encouraged me to mix some intervals into my training rides. I knew he was right, I knew all by myself this was the right thing to do, but somehow I kept on talking myself out of hard intervals. It was too late, I was too tired, I had to get up early... anything but I had to just do the darn things.

I hadn't ridden since Sunday due to long work days so as I pedaled away from home there was an enormous sensation of stiffness as my legs just didn't want to cooperate. I forced myself to climb Superior up to Hoag Hospital and that helped for sure. Then somehow as I headed up PCH for the Santa Ana River Trail things started to come together. I did my first interval and had quite a bit of soreness but the ride back to the start spot for the second interval went smoothly.

As they say, "Carry On". Seven intervals later I had a tremendous sense of accomplishment and still felt pretty darn good. Here's the ride in Strava



And here's some power detail as seen in SportTracks.