Today at lunch I was going out for a ride and thought it would be a good idea to ride at East Miramar. East Miramar is primarily a training area that has very little traffic. I just go out on the main road which is about 5 miles long. Today I was passed by one car and saw three others. The road is smooth and clean and has a lot of small rollers.

Recently on the Wattage Group there has been some discussion of the 90/90/90 workout. Andy Coggan had posted this workout in October 2004 when someone had asked about a winter workout to help maintain some of the fitness gains in the previous season. Dr. Coggan wrote that he did a 90/90/90 workout 3 times a week one winter and the next season was one of his bests. The 90/90/90 refers to intervals at 90% of his best power during peak fitness for 20 minutes, 5 minutes and 30 seconds. Here is the workout he posted:

5 min w/u 
20 min @ 275 W 
5 min easy 
5 min @ 325 W 
2.5 min easy 
5 min @ 325 W 
2.5 min easy 
0.5 min at 500 W 
2 min easy 
0.5 min at 500 W 
2 min easy 
0.5 min at 500 W 
2 min easy 
0.5 min at 500 W 
2.5 min easy 
5 min warm-down

This adds up to just over 1 hour, and I wanted to do a little extra so I just extended the warm up and warm down a little. I was in a hurry, so I didn’t bother calculating my own power goals, and just tried to use the ones Dr. Coggan had posted. This is also a drill in trying to maintain a certain power on the road. I haven’t done many intervals on the road, and am planning on doing more this year, so I thought this would give me some practice. My feedback on the Garmin is a 3 second power average.

Length of interval

90% of my best

Goal for workout

Average power

Normalized Power

20 min*

329

275

272

271

5 min

363

325

325

333

5 min

363

325

326

331

30 sec

604

500

518

  

30 sec

604

500

539

  

30 sec

604

500

535

  

30 sec

604

500

512

  

*The 20 minute interval included a u-turn which dropped power for a couple seconds.

Overall I was pretty pleased with how close I was to my power goals. Now that I know I need to maintain higher powers to be close to the 90% power goal I’ll have to repeat the exercise with new power goals.