Saturday Suffering

We had a full house with 10 of us in our basement pounding the pedals doing a tough, tough Coach Troy sprint session for an hour. I sent out my usual Wednesday e-mail inviting everyone for a spin and politely reminded them that their results in July are determined by their efforts in January. I got reply after reply stating they were coming, fear is an excellent motivator and I was a little worried that we wouldn't have enough space. I counted eight confirmations so I was pretty sure only about 5-6 would show up and we would be fine. However everyone was there ready to rock at 9am, it was a tight squeeze but we had just enough room and there was a fantastic energy before the ride. Amber just wanted to spin easy so I invited Robert to try out the computrainer and he was all over it (hit 596 watts max!).


I wanted to make sure if this many people were going to get up early, pack up their bikes, trainers and lug them down to our basement in the middle January they were going to get what they came for, and they definitely did. The sprint workout may seem a little dumb this time of year but this is exactly the time to push the VO2 to new heights and give your body the necessary time to recover and absorb the training. I'm not going to get tired or burnt-out in January so I push myself and see what is possible. If I start to feel a little more fatigued then I take an extra rest day, who cares it's January. When it's beautiful and sunny outside in June and July the last thing I want to do is sit on the couch and rest even though I know I should. Hey if Lance says he won his tours with the work he did in January then I know I'm going to have a great season with the work I've been putting in.

We started off fairly easy with some 30 second warm ups but once the workout started everyone was hurting from beginning to end. 10 second, all-out efforts on 50 seconds rest for 5 reps, 5 second lead-outs into 10 second sprints with 45 seconds rest. We were all COMPLETELY bagged by the time we hit 30 minutes to go. I looked over at Robert and he was very, very pale and I thought he was going to hurl at any moment. Then we went into the plyometric jumps for 30 seconds and we were all struggling just to get off our bikes, let alone jump off the ground. Fantastic work done by everyone and I'm very proud that so many people showed up even though I warned them that this workout would be a killer. Grande Prairie athletes are awesome! I can't wait until next Saturday.