Lockdown Turbo

Used to joke about outliving my old man, who screeched into an early grave at 53 having modelled his lifestyle on Ronnie Wood and Ozzy Osbourne, but without the fruit, or whatever it is that keeps those guys alive. It's starting to look like my free scoring run rate of the mid 20s through to mid 40's has slowed right down though as I've seen the half-century looming up though and this virus has me absolutely shitting myself. I've no real idea where my lungs and heart are in relation to the rest of the population. Up until mid 2018, I would have said I was a pretty fit guy, able to comfortably run 10km and train for longer endurance events without too much bother. Now, I haven't had any exercise that's stressed me for over 18 months. I'm still carting around weight that I shouldn't - whilst it never actually bothered me before now, it's become apparent to me that I've lost the underlying muscle tone that allowed that.

Anyway, here I am, stuck in Lockdown and it's not great, but actually last year has prepared me well for this and patience is the key to getting through it having achieved something. We've been having daily walks, the apple health app has been warning me that my VO2 max has been sliding, although my resting Heart rate seems to yoyo between 60-70. I've found that actually as my underlying fitness is so low, I actually get tremendous benefit in very short time from just adding a bit more exercise into the mix, so I've put my bike onto a turbo trainer in the greenhouse and am aiming to build up the number and length of sessions over the next few months. Being a geek for the numbers, I've used the Heart rate calculator on this page target Heart rate Calculator to calculate my training zones. As I'm getting back on the bike after a lay off, my plans are to mainly do steady state sessions for the first couple of weeks and probably make the majority of my time in Zone 2, with just a few forays into zone 3.

I've got a Garmin speed / cadence sensor fitted to the bike and an EDGE 500 speedometer, so everything I need to keep an eye on things.

The free version of Strava even facilitates some Heart rate analysis, so a session looks like this.

The distance things is a bit misleading of course. On the turbo, there is constant friction on the wheel, making it much harder than being on the road and stopping peddling sees the rear wheel stop spinning within 1 revolution. It's only useful to compare the distance travelled between turbo sessions rather than a real distance

Relative effort is a Strava term, the definition which they give is

Relative Effort

Relative Effort is an analysis of your heart rate data. By tracking your heart rate through your workout and its level relative to your maximum heart rate, we attach a value to show exactly how hard you worked. The more time you spend going full gas and the longer your activity, the higher the score. Compare your Relative Effort with friends and pros, see if you can do a truly epic workout and motivate yourself to push that extra bit harder! Relative Effort was inspired by the concept of TRIMP (TRaining IMPulse) coined by Dr. Eric Bannister.

I'll probably track that too...

So far I've done 3 sessions a week for 2 weeks and I'm not feeling too bad.

Week 3 plan
4 steady state sessions with 1 harder than the others in mid week.
Warmup : 10 mins, spinning up through the gears
Session : Steadystate - Zone 2/3 for 30 mins (x2 sessions in zone 2 x2 sessions on zone 3.
Warm down - 10 mins dropping through gears