Despite yesterday’s bad workout, I decided to stay the course and pretend it never happened. I did drop the power a simdge, down to 190W from 193W.  After 20 minutes, my HR was really high (151), but the lactate reading was an entirely reasonable 1.7.

So, I went into the second piece at the same power and then blew out the lactates at 3.4.  This was way too high, so, I decided to drop the power by 10 watts to 180W for the third 20′ piece, which yielded a drop down to 2.7.  Still, too high.  So, another drop in power to 170W for the fourth piece, and this one seemed to do the trick. HR was a bit better and lactates were down to 1.9 by the end. For the lazy, here it is in table form.

Here’s the HR graph.

So, what do I conclude?

1. I just opened pandora’s box by looking at lactates in the second through fourth pieces. I think that this will end up causing higher spending on strips and more holes in my finger. I’m not sure how much I like that.
2. I should probably aim at keeping it below 1.7 for the reading at 20 minutes.

Tomorrow:  Hard 6K threshold piece.