Week 20 - Critical Power Test done!

 Another week in the books and another critical power test done!

This was the 4th week of training and thus had one less day of training.  I didn't run on Monday but ran Wednesday and Friday.  Wednesday was a 35 minute easy run and Friday was also 35 minutes easy but with a couple of strides thrown in.  Both of the runs felt good and are probably what was needed.  Once again I've hit the dog days of summer or of training or something.  I just wasn't feeling the training this last week and the idea of getting up early to go running is just getting to me.  But I'm pushing through for the next couple of weeks and then will have some vacation time where I'll be able to run in a new location and at different times.  

I wasn't sure what to expect coming into this critical power test.  I was nervous about doing it because it was in the heat or more in the heat than my past CP tests.  I almost tossed in the towel to put it off a week but I did it anyways.  It was hot as I knew it would be but once I was out there I went with it. After a 10 minute warm up I went into my 3 minute test and ripped that off at a power of 382 watts.  I was supposed to be in the range of I think 363 if I remember correctly.  I was definetly breathing hard after I was done with that and I walked for a minute before I picked up a slow jog.  The slow jog felt really good and I feel like I could have just ran at that pace for the rest of the day.  But it had to come to an end so I could then do the 12 minute portion of the test.  For this one I was supposed to average about 338 watts and in the end I cruised at 344 watts.  And my CP went down...by 3 watts. Which I'm fine with.  I felt that the 325 I got after my 5K race was a bit to much and now I feel like I'm where I should be.  I think.  I've got a couple of hard workouts coming up that I hope will get me to the race line at a little better CP but I'm not to concerned with it.  The Stryd critical power, in my opinion, does not translate well over to the trails. I'm not sure what or if they do any additional calculations if you set it to trail but the watts they say I can run this race at is a lot different than what I can actually do.  I'm pretty sure I know what I'm going to do for that race but I'll detail that later. So not disappointed with the CP going down.  It was only 3 watts and I know in the fall if I do a CP test it will definitely go up!

This next week will be back to 4 days of running.  I think I'll have a workout on Wednesday and then a long run on Saturday and then I'm going to start dialing back the long run, as I did for the 5K, and focus more on getting the speed or the V02 max up a bit!  Since this is a short race I'm going to assume that increasing my V02 will help!

Ran happy!

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