new scenery

Today I had new scenery on my 3-hr ride! Ah, no, not outside yet. Today I decided to mix it up and parked my trainer at my parent's house. It worked out well, nothing to distract me or tempt me to cut it short. The ride actually went really well. I broke up the ride into segments and it looked like this:

Hour 1 - warm-up

15:00 warm-up

15:00 single leg drills (1 minute right leg, 1 minute left leg, 1 minute both, repeat)

15:00 steady ride

15:00 tempo

Hour 2 - strength

4 x (10 minutes big ring, low gear, plus 5:00 recovery)

-each segment I went down a gear

Hour 3 - speed/power

2 x (5:00 hard, 5:00 easy, 4:00 hard, 4:00 easy, 3:00 hard, 3:00 easy, 2:00 hard, 2:00 easy, 1:00 hard, 1:00 easy)

The ride was definitely long and difficult, but I kept focus on the interval at hand and didn't think too much about how much time was left in total. That helped a lot. Plus, I had some great tunes going and nutrition ready to go as well. The toughest part was the tempo portion in the first hour and then the power/speed intervals in the 3rd hour. Ouch!

My legs are pretty tired and sluggish. It will be an interesting 12-mile run tomorrow...