2014 Tour of Sufferlandria - Stage 8

Here were are: The penultimate Stage 8 - Blender

Webb: How does one describe Blender? Let's see, you start with one bag of intervals and then you add another bag of different types of intervals then you complete it with a third bag of a different type of intervals. Yay! Intervals! Damn you Neal Henderson!

Elle: I normally enjoy suffering through this workout. I like intervals. But not today. There was just so much soreness in so many places.

Webb: I know the Sufferlandrians were all freaked out about Stage 7. I get that. I was too. Stage 8 worried me more because Blender is damn hard and I could not imagine doing it the day after a double-session of Angels and The Hunted. Just to make it more difficult, we had to be on the bikes about 30 minutes after waking up. Such is the life of a Sufferlandrian.

Elle: Here we are, in the final days of the tour. Everyone is hurting. Everyone is tired. We may be starting to go a little crazy. My pre-workout nutrition was 3 full on spoonfuls of Nutella. Meanwhile, Webb had left-over fries from last night. Yeah, we're cool like that.

Webb: I dialed this one back to 70%. I was too tired from the previous seven days, finishing the double-session about 12 hours earlier and just waking up. Even at a recovery effort the legs were not moving the first 15-20 minutes. Like a sprinter in the mountains, I just kept the pedals moving and willing myself to the finish line.

Elle: I had done Rubber Glove at 100% and then all of the following videos at 80%. That made each workout challenging, but allowed me (I think) to go strong for the whole Tour.

Webb: That was a good way to handle the Tour. I, on the other hand, opted to do Rubber Glove and The Wretched at 100% and then pick and choose which videos I would scale back and by how much depending on how I felt at the time. Of course that also means I could exceed my targets on a given day if I ended up feeling better as the workout proceeded. That happened on Stage 8.

During the dreaded pain shakes - thanks again Coach Neal - something happened. The legs began to stir. By the time we arrived at the third set of shakes, I decided to climb the ladder. With each of the six :20 intervals I increased my watts. I didn't break any records, but I did break up some junk in my legs. I followed the same model for the final TT intervals. No records were harmed in this set either. Instead, my reward was sitting on my bike after the workout ended wondering how I was going to dismount.

Elle: This stage hurt (obviously), but it's always fun to see Cavendish almost get clocked in the head. And then the blender shows up on the screen, and I start craving smoothies like you don't even know. Luckily Webb just bought me a Magic Bullet blender, so I made my own 'pain' shakes. Mine were way more enjoyable...