Another Steady State Data Point

Today I ignored lesson 1 for steady state sessions. If it is supposed to be a UT2 or UT1 session, it is not supposed to feel like hard work. If it does, you should back down, reduce the intensity, or even just stop and take a rest day.

For science (or rather for my curiosity as my method lacks scientific rigor), I pushed on.

A lot of things were different today, compared to the steady state sessions that I measured lactate on so far:

1. I didn’t sleep well. I woke up from a dream which I could remember quite vividly, which doesn’t happen very often. It was 3AM. Between 3AM and 6AM I was turning in bed, not sleeping well.
2. I cycled to work. Made a point of cycling very lightly, “to get yesterday’s heavy session out of my system”.
3. I had a big cold salad for lunch, then nothing for the entire afternoon, and for dinner I decided to add an omelet to my usual light dinner.
4. The weather has changed from nice, cold and dry to 10 degrees C, rainy and humid.
5. It is not November any more.

I did a 3×20 min tonight with a lactate measurement after the last 20 minute interval.

I warmed up for 5 minutes.

First interval didn’t feel too bad. I slowly ramped up the power for the first 10 minutes and ended up doing a 190W on average.

I rowed the second interval with an eye on the clock. It seemed endless. I knew I was working harder than I want to work in steady state sessions, but after 10 minutes funnily the pace started to drift to 210W and I had to consciously keep it down. Still, my breathing and the feeling in my legs told me I was working too hard.

The third interval was hard. The kind of annoying steady state “hard”. It just took too much mental effort to hold the pace. I did some stroke rate changes in the first 10 minutes just to keep the focus. Took a lactate measurement immediately after the interval:

Feeling confirmed. I was actually very happy about this result. It gives me more confidence in lactate measurement as a method to confirm what the perceived rate of effort tells me. And thus it also gives me confidence to continue doing what I have done so far: If it feels too hard, back down.

I’ll start keeping my lactate readings, together with notes on heart rate, perceived level of effort and some other parameters in a spreadsheet.

Here’s the HR plot of the session:


Workout Summary - Dec 01, 2015
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|Watts|SPM-|-HR--|-DPS
--|15428|64:00.0|02:04.5|181.6|22.2|156.9|10.9
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|Watts|SPM-|AvgHR|DPS-|Comments
01|04902|20:00.0|02:02.4|190.9|21.1|147.2|11.6|1st 20 min
02|00345|02:00.0|02:53.7|066.8|17.5|124.5|09.9|rest
03|04990|20:00.0|02:00.2|201.3|23.3|161.2|10.7|2nd 20 min
04|00220|02:00.0|04:33.0|017.2|13.0|127.9|08.5|rest
05|04971|20:00.0|02:00.7|199.0|23.5|165.4|10.6|3rd 20 min: 2.5 mmol/L


HR drift was 7%.