As the title suggests its test week this week, FTP test, CSS and 5k run time trial. I always dread this week but training has gone well and I’m feeling good! So here goes!
Well the first one was the FTP test, to be honest this came after the day from hell at work and I was shattered, never the less I was determined to give it a shot. In all honesty I completely talked my way out of this session before it even started! My best test to date I held 260w for the 20 minutes and my sessions up until this point have been right on power if not the upper limits of the zones. So I felt I would start off at 260w and see how I felt. In short I felt awful! My power was holding but my heart rate was right up in the high 160 straight from the off. I tried to back down 10w about 3 mins in and I felt even worse and just abandoned the session after 5 minutes. Pretty deflated about that one but it just wasn’t happening that day at all!
So onto the CSS swim test. As soon as I got to the pool side and spotted the only swim lane section had 5 people doing head up breast stroke my initial thought was not a good one. I went through the motions with the warm/ drills and one length efforts in the hope these swimmers where soon getting out. I didn’t even record the warm up on my GPS watch. It was having a fit and beeping away not having a clue what length I was on stop/starting all the time trying to weave in and out of swimmers! Good open water practice though, haha. Anyways onto the actual test I only had one swimmer left in the lane so I set off on my 400m set. My previous time for this was 6:22. I put everything I had into it and only got held up briefly once. I managed 6:31 so 9 seconds slower. I’ll take that and wasn’t too disappointed! After the recovery I went onto the 200m set. The previous time I managed 3:02 for this. After the 400m being slightly slower I was determined to give this my best shot and see what I could do! I managed a 3:04 and 2 seconds slower. So overall not too bad, limiting swim time to once a week is hindering me slightly and I’m not really improving nor getting worse at swimming. So my current CSS is 1:44 a one second slower CSS than last time. My CSS all-time best in the last 5 years have been was 1:35 so think I need to really swim more to get it back down to that. It simply can’t happen when I limit my swimming to once a week!
Then its run time! My previous best for this one is 23:57. Now due to poor time management, being really busy at work and sorting stuff for our daughters birthday the remaining sessions this week didn’t come off. All red for the rest of the week! Not good!
So this week coming week I’ve got the exact same test week! Im determined to get things back on track this week and put in a some quality sessions. Tune in next week to see, hopefully a better right up!
– Mike Catton
Check out last weeks article here:
All his previous articles are stored here
https://www.coachray.nz/category/client-stories/mikes-middle-distance-magic/