I’ve been saying over and over how this quarantine is the perfect opportunity to practice being who we want to be after this is all over.
So I want to share how I am doing just that.
I want to be a strong cyclist. I know I have the potential to become a stronger cyclist. I’m not done improving. I work on my mental capacity daily, while also staying open and resourceful to new ways to define my personal potential.
I have BIG goals and while they may be on a bit of a hold right now, they are FAR from canceled!
The new shelter-in-place mandate and physical distancing timeline extension was exactly the little kick in the pants I needed to take on a new project. Well…kind of new…..I’ve been sitting on it since Christmas because that’s when Danny bought this bike test for me, but the quarantine felt like the perfect circumstance to finally put it to good use!
Enter the Scientific Triathlon INSYD test. I learned about it from Danny and he learned about it on the Scientific Triathlon podcast. The website has oodles of good information that I highly suggest checking out. The basic premise is that most of us train by guessing what’s best for our physiology. We also overly rely on our Functional Threshold Power as a performance metric. FTP is a combination of VO2max and VLaMax, yet most of us have never even heard of VLaMax before. I definitely hadn’t! This testing protocol breaks down an individual's physiology to determine which metric needs to be improved and what type of bike training will improve it.
I look at this as an opportunity to learn more about myself as an athlete and be an active participant in my continued progression and growth in the sport of triathlon.
It’s so easy to get in a groove…to open up Training Peaks week after week and simply play in the check-all-of-the-boxes Olympics. I love a green Training Peaks as much as the next.
But what ends of happening is we take a backseat in our progression. We become a passenger instead of a driver. This may seem necessary if you have a coach providing workouts, but it doesn’t have to be that way. A strong coaching relationship is one based on trust and communication. We cannot expect to get the most out of our training without taking an active role in it.
And guess what….this is also the case when it comes to increasing your mental capacity. If you keep believing what you’ve always believed about your capacity to reach goals, you will continue to repeat the same results. When you are willing to stretch your mind to believe something new, you will reach a whole new level of performance.
It takes commitment to both the physical elements of training AND the mental to truly unlock that next level.
Most of us don’t get there because we’re scared of the unknown. That’s EXACTLY what I was scared of before executing the INSCYD bike test this morning. That’s why I sat on it for 3 months. No joke.
I was scared of the hard. Scared of the results telling I’m a lost cause. I was letting my old story about always being a mediocre cyclist hold me back. And I’m not going to lie…that story crept in all the way through the test. But I lined up to the challenge anyway. For that I am crazy proud.
Here’s a simple breakdown of how the test went:
33 minute warm up
15 second seated sprint test
17 minute recovery
4 minute overpaced test
36 minute recovery
20 minute overpaced test
10 minute recovery
The idea is start all of them much harder than your sustainable consistent effort for that length of test. Then hold on for as long as possible, let the power plateau and continue to go hard through the whole interval.
So the moral of it all: GO HARD. It should feel HARD at all times. (Cue my freak out! Because, hey this girl likes LONG course triathlon for a reason!)
I went HARD. The 15 second sprint went by so much faster than I thought it would. The 4 minute test was a lung burner…it took me almost 15 minutes after to be able to breathe normal again. And then the 20 minute test was the true test for me.
It was so hard to remember that this was a test meant to gather data and the point was to go hard and expect the power to plateau. I tried to fight that so hard during the 20 minute test. I mistakenly chose an (arbitrary I might say!) power number I thought I could hold for the majority of the test and it was too high while also try to keep my cadence up. I struggled. And the struggle was mentally mostly because my ego wanted to hold that particular power number and I felt like I was giving up if I let it go. But the point of this test was to gather data and execute it correctly in order to gather data appropriately.
Understanding and accepting this difference was huge for me.
And thank goodness I had Danny on the bike next to me a few times throughout the test!
Overall, I’m proud of my effort and the hurdle I had to climb to do the test at ALL and also do it correctly. I’m sitting here 6 hours post test and still feeling it in my legs and lungs. Hurts so good.
I sent in my results to the data master over at Scientific Triathlon and looking forward to getting a recap on how best to approach my bike training moving forward. If it’s interesting, I may do a follow up blog post about it. If you have any questions about this test, let me know!
