19 Minutes, Honest Numbers

The workout

Sunday, May 11. 5:28 PM. Twenty-minute HIIT ride with Alex Toussaint on the Peloton. Indoor trainer.

• Moving time: 19 min
• Avg watts: 174W
• Normalized power: 175W
• Max watts: 288W
• Total work: 196 kJ
• Leaderboard: 2,033 of 10,773 (top 19%)

What this tells me

Average watts and normalized power being nearly identical means I held a pretty consistent effort. No big surges that skewed the average. That's not a flex, that's just what the data says.

Max watts at 288W is a ceiling I hit briefly. My current FTP is 216W, so touching 288W means I was pushing well above threshold for short intervals. That's the point of HIIT. You go hard, you recover, you go hard again.

Top 19% on the leaderboard for that class. I'll take it. It's not where I was in 2022 when my FTP was 295W and I was at 2.27 W/kg -- wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. That number is worse now. I'll share the current W/kg in a dedicated post when I do a proper FTP test.

Why 19 minutes counts

Some weeks the calendar doesn't give you two hours. It gives you 19 minutes. You can skip it or you can do something with it.

I did something with it.

With TheBayRide on August 29th, I'm 15 weeks out. The 135-mile loop around the Bay doesn't care how busy my calendar was in May. It just shows up. So I show up too, even when it's a 19-minute HIIT session on an indoor trainer on a Sunday evening.

What's coming

I'm going to keep posting these. Short rides, long rides, the weeks I miss, the FTP tests. All of it. Because the point of sharing this isn't to look strong. It's to show what actual training looks like when you're also running an event, a company, and a household.

If you're building toward TheBayRide, whether you're doing the full 135-mile loop or the 35-mile route from SF to Oakland, the math is the same. Consistent effort over time beats occasional heroics.

More soon.

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