Day 1 of a training block

For a variety of reasons I have the week off to get some work done and I'm training a lot, my goal is 3 hours per day. The plan is 4 days doing 3 hour rides and then the other 3 days, ride 90 minutes and lift 90 minutes. I'm not sure I'll be able to make it, this is a massive increase over my usual training load, but sometimes you just gotta give it a go.

Here's today's ride, it was basically perfect, kept my pulse and power right in line with what I wanted (zone 2, 129 - 149 BPM, power around 170 Watts).

Another way to slice it is by zone,

Almost zero traffic out on on a sunny Christmas day, most of my rides recently have been shorter and harder so it was nice to settle into a comfortable endurance pace and just stick it there for a few hours.

Here's a pretty good picture of my body's response after the ride, very high stress starting around 11:20 when the ride ended and the stress coming down as I slowly recover. The stress numbers come from my Vital Scout app (www.vitalscout.io). The green bars on the left are the end of the workout.

One thing I'm doing for these rides is fasting and doing the first 2 hours on no calories. Hour 1 I take in water with electrolytes (Hammer Endurolytes), hour 2, BCAA's, hour 3 some espresso Hammer Gel and half a Lara Bar. I've gotten very interested in blood glucose, here's my data on that:

The 99 was before the ride, after a cup of coffee (no breakfast), the 117 after I got home. Turns out your body can make glucose, and one of the aminos in my BCAA mix (leucine I think) jacks up glucose, so that plus the calories I had drove it up. Here's what it looks like at the end of a 24 hour fast:

It's amazing how good I feel when I'm fasting, I've gotten more disciplined about doing a 24 hour fast once per week.

Will share some sleep data tomorrow from several devices, including my brand new Beddr.