So this is what I did on Monday. Over 6 miles of up and down this flight of stairs. All at MAF. Things to realize before you decide to try something like this. 1. This will take about an hour. 2. If you are doing this correctly, even MAF does not make this work easy. 3. If you are doing this correctly, walking down the stairs is way harder than running up them. 4. Walking down the stairs isn't really much of a recovery (This should be obvious from #3 but in case it isn't I'll just point this out for the record). 5. On an 80 degree morning, after about 20 minutes of this, there was steam coming off my shoulders so you should expect this too. And 6. Running up and down stairs like these 60 times in a row felt almost like the end of an ironman -- I know my whole body was shaking when I finished and this wasn't the first time I'd done this workout. The first time I was nauseous for the rest of the day afterward so I'll call shaking a step in the right direction.
At any rate after that was a Threshold Power workout on the trainer. Needless to say my legs were useless to me after that. But I want to start doing workouts that really challenge me to the point of fatigue while staying completely aerobic. This session definitely filled the bill in that regard.
On Tuesday I did a 2 hour recovery bike. I averaged about 19 mph and my heart rate average was about 128. The last 10 min of the ride was tough because my legs were still toast from Monday. Then I went and did a drill focused swim to further recover from Monday.
Today was an hour twenty minute bike in the morning and a 50 min run in the afternoon. I really struggled with the heat on this run. My legs were still tired but the heat today was brutal. I was on the trail at about 5:30 and it was still around 100 degrees here. In the shade. Oh well now I'm off to bed so I can get to the track first thing in the morning tomorrow. Cheers!
