good days and bad days

With high intensity training, you've got your good days and bad days.  On my easy days, I go pretty easy.  Usually I'm averaging less than 210 watts and never higher than 240 watts or so.  It's a comfortable pace for me.  On my hard days, I'm doing what I call "Race Intervals".  This consists of riding 5 minutes at the lower limit of your functional threshold, then 2 minutes at the upper limit, then repeat two more times for a total set of 21 minutes.  For me, I'm riding at 329W for 5 minutes, then 383W for 2 minutes.  This is a really hard workout because you never get to recover.  I think it's good for 'cross because it's pretty realistic of the racing.

I did one set on Wednesday, but couldn't make the second.  This morning, I made my two sets and felt like I could do at least part of another.  Here's a graph of my heart rate for the sets on Wednesday and today.

The red line is my heart rate from the first set of Wednesday's workout.  As you can see, my heart rate had already spiked to 190+ on my second 2 minute interval and at the end of the workout I was near my max.  There's no second set data because I was wasted.  The green line is my first set from today's workout.  As you can see, I was recovering better (hr lower during 5 minute portions) and my hr didn't spike as high for the second and third 2 minute intervals.  The purple is the second set and, as expected, my hr is pretty high right from the start, but again, I didn't get as high of a hr on the last 2 minute portion.

This is telling me that I was recovered, rested, and motivated for this morning's workout.  I think this is a good example of how you can have a bad race or training day and not know what went wrong.  If I look back at the days proceeding these days, it helps give me an idea of things to try and things to avoid during my easy days.  (Incidentally, last night, I had pasta and acorn squash for dinner and the night before Wednesday's workout, I had Chick-fil-a fast food.  That may or may not have had something to do with it).