This session looks completely backwards on paper. It starts with some of the hardest efforts I'll do all week, and finishes with an easy ride. Forty seconds flat out, twenty seconds easy, ten times. Recover. Then do the whole thing again. Twenty VO2 max intervals before I've even got to the main part of the ride.
Raise the ceiling, raise the floor
My coach's explanation is the only one that's ever made it click for me: raise the ceiling, and the floor comes with it. Push my VO2 max up, and my maximum capacity goes up. That pulls LT2 upwards. And when LT2 improves, LT1 improves right along with it — which means I can ride faster at exactly the same effort.
So after twenty of the hardest efforts of the week, I settle into a steady twenty minutes at LT1. Completely different feeling — steady cadence, TT position, controlled breathing. That's the part that actually looks like race day.
The goal was never to get better at riding hard for forty seconds. It's to raise the ceiling on what my body can do, so everything underneath it — VO2 max, LT2, LT1 — rises with it. Ironman isn't won by riding at your max. It's won by making race pace feel easy.