Staying in Zone 5

The other day on the internal Microsoft Bicycle alias there was a post about training for hills. One person mentioned he had been doing 30 mins every night on an indoor trainer (actually rollers) and found that when he got back on the hills he was performing much better outside. A few more people jumped in on this and the gist was for hills its important to raise your lactate threshold by spending more and more time right at it.

So this morning in Thursday's spin class I really pushed myself to spend time in Zone 5 (beyond my threshold value of 167). At the end of the class I did a very hard push of 10 straight minutes. It was tough for the first few minutes but as the time went on I felt a weird feeling of calmness, as if I could do this for a long time.

1056 calories in 52 minutes and an average heart-rate of 162bpm over that time.