Sunday (2/2) ride from the depot at 9:00. We are just three weeks away from our first race at Fort Ord! Almost all our rides will feature some harder intervals from here on out. I know these aren’t fun, but they will definitely help you get faster. I have a few things I want to say about them, and I never really get a chance to address everyone at the rides: 1) You don’t have to do them. If you want to keep your riding fun and less painful that is your prerogative. 2)… I want you to do them. 3) If you do them, I would like you to do them correctly. Our intervals will vary from 1 to 5 minutes (unless we are going for a fixed distance, in which case they could go longer). In general, your interval should be as hard as you can go while maintaing a steady pace. That is, if your power/speed falls off towards the end, you went too hard. If you have enough left to kick even harder at the end, you went to easy. Thus, your pace for a 1 minute interval is MUCH harder than for a 5. Don’t cheat yourself. Really try to dial in your effort so that you are getting your max effort through the whole thing. REST in-between! Because you are workng so hard on the interval, sometimes you can back off a little at the end and keep moving pretty fast. This isn’t optimal. You really want to recover and bring your heart rate way down. You should be able to have a easy conversation (without gasping) with the rider next to you before you start the next one. Most of you are going too hard during your recovery. Our rest periods will generally be about twice the length of the interval we just finished. Please ask me about any of this (or anything else) that isn’t clear. See you Sunday! Oh, and don’t forget to look at Christy’s poll below about axle types, and bring a watch or something to time your intervals with.