Outdoor Workout - Downhill and traffic stops

Training
1

Hello everyone, newbie question here. How do you handle down hill and stops for traffic etc. when you are doing a workout outdoors?
For downhill is it best to-

  1. Pause the workout
  2. Ride the brakes and try to maintain target power
  3. Just accept your power target will drop?

For traffic stops, do you pause or just let the workout run?

Thank you.

2

Well, just accept that you can’t follow a workout 100% when riding it outdoors.
Pausing will completely mess up the timeline of your workout. And also other metrics like W’, HRrc…
If you’re riding a known course, you can mostly predict where you will have more or less problems. Just tailor the workout so that the important parts are on a section with little chance of interruptions.

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3

Thank you.

4

It also depends a lot on the length of the interval. For short intervals (anything under ~5 min), a short pause gives you enough recovery that it undermines the point of the workout - it’s usually the last 30% of the interval AFTER building up the fatigue from the first 70% that is where the improvements happen. So for those workouts, route selection is really critical. Most people will develop a library of good locations for different lengths of workout - I know exactly which local hill use for intervals of various lengths.

At the other end of the spectrum, for longer and lower intensity, I don’t think it matters too much - just set your display to Normalized Power to smooth out the stops and coasting and don’t worry about it. You will also be accelerating and going uphill, so things will balance out. If you live in the city, the hardest intervals can be those 8-10 minute efforts, or ones with very short rests between sets. I know that for me, it’s hard to get an uninterrupted stretch of road that is that long if I’m limited to 90 minutes round trip from my house, so for those types of workout, I’ll usually opt to do them indoors.

You can also choose to embrace the stochastic nature of the real world, I used to have a commute with a stoplight every 30-60s for several miles, I would do a full sprint out of each one and then settle as hard as I could before slamming on the brakes at the next light. It turned out to be great training for crit racing, but was hard to quantify beyond total kJ of work. (although that would be easier now with intervals.icu!)

1 Like