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This week was a short one of training due to a number of factors. After racing this past weekend at Columbia, I wasn’t able to do any training on Monday (team meeting after work) and the weather limited me to trainer rides pretty much. On Tuesday, I ended up riding the trainer for 90 minutes at a moderate effort to just spin out the legs.

On Wednesday, I met Andrea and we went through some different explosive power exercises. She is trying to teach me Olympic style lifts and I am a bad student…I mean it is not coming naturally to me at all. I am making progress finally on part of the movement for a clean. She also showed me and I was able to do some wide-grip (snatch style) overhead presses (jerk and/or push style). These pretty much also bring up the awkward movements associated with doing an overhead squat. I guess it is pretty normal, but my wrists were definitely a limiter on those…plus the backward bending of the arms locked out over head.

After probably 30 minutes of that with various combinations of movements (cleans, pushpress, jerks, squats, etc), we moved on to some different style workouts. She put together some crossfit style thing that we did in a descending sets (circuit style) of 20, 15, 10, 5 reps…. We combined squats/dumbell overhead presses (fast), vertical jumps, chin ups, and walking lunges…. by the end the jumps were less than explosive, but I tried to make them that way. I also was pretty much out of breath by the time all of that was done as well.

I then went home and got on the trainer. I put in a tape that I bought 3 years ago probably and never played. It was a Carmichael Training Systems (CTS) tape on sprinting. My legs were tired getting on the bike, but I got through it pretty much okay. After some warm-up 1 minute intervals, the tape takes you through a pair of power intervals sets (3×12 seconds) in a big gear… 20 rpm - 120 rpm (seated) and then 0 rpm to 90 rpm (standing). After that were two pair of lighter gear intervals (2×20 sec) from 90 - 130 rpm (seated) and then 95-120 rpm (standing). At the end were two long progressive intervals that involved 1:20 of ramp and a 10 second all out sprint. By those final intervals, I was pretty much cooked and my legs felt as if they were buckling underneath me when standing and sprinting.  You can see my rpms fell off to nearly nothing at the end of the long intervals (after the sprint).

The worst part was not that day… it was this morning. My quads are incredibly stiff and sore. I have been stretching all day as best I can. I made the drive from Memphis to Chattanooga (about a 300 mile drive) this afternoon/evening so I had to spend a lot of hours sitting still…which didn’t help. I drove over today to do some work in town tomorrow and then show up for the cyclocross race on Saturday. I hope my legs are recovered in time for the race…