Enter eight week of the twelve weeks festivity period known as all purpose road. As any fall day, I spend my days dreaming with a nice jazz background and the smell of coffee in the air. Life, indeed is sweet. I do not mind much of how my seventh week Half Monty results were not as envisioned…just a bit less power gain than I would have wanted but in any case, this promises nice sweet spot rides in the coming weeks.
In comes the rookie. This rookie, I tell myself, with these new “not so high” numbers should not be an issue to handle.
-Blink and you’ll miss it-
Last sprint of the second race; where are my legs? where’s the power? It must be this damn trainer! I’ll crush the next ten minutes, no worries.
Four minutes in the last race; now I lost my lungs as well! system alert: hazardous! Right, back-up, LvL Mode, you’re in…just to casually hit power targets for the three minutes.
Guys, girls; who else here struggles with The Rookie? Is it suppose to punish this way for sprinter type of riders? I need revenge, I just want to know the beast I’m facing a little bit better =D
…still, happy HM didn’t increase my numbers more than it did (laughing and crying)
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Ive always found The Rookie to be a really brutal session. Not sure I’ve ever got through it at 100%
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I love the rookie, such a good insight into how crazy, hard, and sweary the pro peloton is. Absolutely brilliant on-bike footage
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I’ve done The Rookie on 100% and 90%. It’s tough, but doable tough. I love the race footage and behind the scenes footage. And also how they also got the riders to play along. And also the outtakes at the end.
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I attempted the Rookie for the first time yesterday and it broke me midway through.
I must admit I was feeling slightly off form going in, but the start didn’t seem too bad and after the first race interval I was starting to think I might just scrape through.
But alas the combination of high cadence and repeated efforts above threshold ground me down in the middle of the second race. I had to take a few pauses and then skipped the last sprint. I dialled down to 90% for the final race, but I was too tired to hold the power even slightly above threshold and bailed out well before the end.
I think my big weakness is recovering from repeated efforts above threshold. My MAP is relatively high and I cope well with single MAP efforts at the end of intervals with plenty of recovery time straight after (like in Attacker). But these relatively long intervals with multiple MAP efforts thrown in really destroy me!
I’m going to give this one another shot when I’m feeling more fresh, but I might drop the MAP targets by 5-10% to give me a fighting chance.
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