Surprising

Just the other day I established what I thought would be a challenging indoor training goal of maintaining an average heart rate of between 128-132 bpm.  Looks like it's not so challenging. 

When I got on the trainer today the first 5 minutes felt uncomfortable and I was wondering if this was going to be a crappy 90 minutes of disappointment.  Twenty minutes later I was having to restrain myself from pushing past the 130's.  For the rest of the workout I found myself easily pushing into the late 130's and then backing off so as to stay on plan. 

I think part of what is going on is that:

• I'm regaining the fitness I let slide as I closed out the cycling season about 8 weeks ago and played catch-up with neglected family/work duties;
• I typically close my eyes when indoors;
• My mind wanders (`to do' lists, memories of past rides, etc);
• I get caught up in the music I'm listening to.  

I'll let what happens happen over the next week or two, not pushing for `peformance' and power so early into the indoor training off-season. 

The (possibly) good news is that I may simply be stronger than I was last year, stronger than I thought.  It's interesting to recognize how our body's response to years of training improves despite (in my case) the fact that I'm 65 yrs old. 

I wonder if I should increase the HR goal to the 140's range.  This increases my curiosity about how many watts I'm generating.  But that will have to wait.  I have to be careful to not spend too much time training at the expense of the many other things going on in my life. 

Balance.  Always the important variable.