It has been a few rides since I have taken on a power zone max ride and given that I am currently in between power zone challenges, I figured, why not? I have not had my new zones for very long, just since the last FTP test ride. PRs are cool and all until you see the new training percentages. Probably why I never really had trouble when my Olympic lifts went up because they were always by such a small margin as to not adjust my training percentages too much. My FTP went up enough to make my old zone 4 my new zone 3. Mentally I couldn’t seem to wrap my head around it and my legs followed suit.
Since I am trying to get more comfortable in the new zones before the next challenge kicks off, it felt like it was time to get one of these power zone max rides in. There were two intervals in zone 5 that were two minutes long, followed by two intervals in zone 6 that were one minute. The zone 6 intervals felt smoother than the zone 5 intervals. Look, zone 5 just sucks. At the end, the goal was to hold 7 for anywhere from 15 seconds to 30 seconds. If you dropped out of zone 7 then you went ahead and started to recover. I want to say that I was able to hold zone 7 for about 25 seconds before dropping to recovery. I should have been able to hold it another 5 seconds but mentally tapped out.
I felt all over the place in my zones. I was pretty happy to see how close to the power target I was able to stay.
It is funny looking back on this how hard it felt going through it, only to look back and realize the majority of the ride was actually spent in zone 1 recovering.