Last night was my lactate threshold testing night. Fun stuff, not really, but very important.
My plan for the evening was get the rollers rolling for an easy 10 minutes as a nice warm up. Then, 30 minutes, all out effort. 10 minutes in, reset the heart rate monitor at 10 minutes as I can toss out the wandering heart rate and then cool down for the last couple of minutes. I am really not a huge fan of doing this type of stuff. I don’t like sitting there and pushing as hard as possible for 30 minutes, keeping myself right on the brink of almost throwing up the entire time.. It is never a great day when I see this test on the schedule.
Over the 20 minutes of my all out recorded effort, I managed to have an average heart rate of 175. What should the number be?? Well, that all depends on the individual athlete. The higher the number relative to their max heart rate the better. The higher the number, the longer the athlete can ride and clear lactic acid at higher heart rates. With this number, I can now set up all of my heart rate zones for the upcoming training weeks.
My max heart rate, from what I have observed in the past couple of months is 194. So, I can ride pretty damn close to my max and still be able to clear out lactic acid from the legs. The one thing that is a good value to see is that over the past year, my LT has gone from 155 to 175. That’s a pretty good jump and will help out with my training this year. That also shows me that all the work I did last year with my coach has really paid off…
Gee, can you tell when the test started and ended??
