This was my first year attempting the Tour of Sufferlandria--9 days of intense spinning and suffering. It's been about three weeks since I completed the Tour and I'm still on a high from accomplishing it :)
In these posts, I'll break down each ride according to length, format, music, footage, difficulty, other random thoughts and an overall score.
The scheduled ride for Day 1 (January 25th) was Rubber Glove.
(And yes, the analogy that you're about to get an intense, ahem, *examination*
runs rampant throughout the video).
Length: 60 minutes
Format: Rubber Glove is a Functional Threshold Performance
test (FTP), which basically means finding your optimal training zone. There's a
short warmup and then 20 minutes of intervals where you slowly increase the
intensity (but you don't get too intense during this stage). This is followed by 8 minutes of
sprints (4 sprints with 1 minute recovery in between each one). You get a brief
recovery before the FTP starts--the FTP is 20 minutes of all-out effort. Then a
cooldown and you're done!
Music: decent but not as fun or as motivating as in other
Sufferfest workouts. Mostly electronica.
Footage: the Tour of Flanders
Difficulty: overall, I'd rate this a 7.5/10 for difficulty.
The FTP portion would get a 9/10 but the rest of the workout is more around
6/10 so it averages out to about a 7.5.
Other Random Thoughts: I liked this one a lot--it's a
challenging-without-killing-you workout. The length is also perfect and it
seemed to go by really fast. I didn't find the humour in this one to be quite
as strong as in other Sufferfest workouts--there are some Sufferfest workouts
where I literally laugh out loud several times at the captions but his wasn't
one of them. My biggest complaint: at one point, they pull away from the race
footage to show a woman on a bike trainer making an omelette. I thought this
was funny and I enjoyed this for about 15 seconds. I didn't think it was funny
anymore at the 45 second mark. Or the one minute mark. Or after two minutes of
omelette-making. I just wanted to get back to the race footage. They
kept cutting back to this woman for each recovery interval, which made me dread
the recovery. Not sure why but this just really bugged me and may prevent me
from doing RG too often.
Overall: without omelette-chick, I would have given this
probably an 8.5 or 9 out of 10. But pulling away from the motivating and
exciting race footage to show me several minutes of a woman making an omelette
left a bad taste in my mouth so it gets a 7.5/10.
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