Not the Epic Post, Part I

I've given up all hope of sitting down and creating the epic post that has been mentioned (well at least any time before Xmas). Therefore I've decided to break this down into a number of segments to make it manageable. You see I've been hauling around a bag of cats and it's time to let them out... Let's start at the beginning.

I made a passing mention to this way back when, but my lovely wife gave me one of the best anniversary gifts ever back in July. You got it, I got a VO2 Max and Lactate Threshold test :) Having never done this before I had no idea what to expect. My training to date had been a few steps above mediocre so I was pretty sure there wouldn't be an EMT team standing by, but I knew Guinness (the record people, not the beer) wouldn't be there either. To be honest, the whole experience was kinda cool in a I want to throw up in this mask sort of way. One of my sick friends had actually planned to come watch because he has some bizarre fascination with watching people push their bodies to total muscle failure. Fortunately he missed the fun.

So what'd I learn? Well I was labeled as follows:
LT Wattage = 320
LT HR = 169
LT Watts/kg = 3.66 (kinda sucky)
Max Watts = 450 (note, not absolute max I can do... this is where my legs said F U!)
Aerobic Threshold = HR<132 (pretty sucky)
Peak VO2 = 69.3 @ HR = 191bpm
VO2 @ AT = 53.7

So what does it all mean? Well I think it's not inaccurate to say that it means my training base really sucked, I was doing hard stuff sufficiently hard (but probably too much of it), I'm not quite an aerobic freak (but well above average), and I've got a long way to go. At least those were many of the layman's explanations I got. If you've never been tested, I recommend it. It can tell you a lot. I actually found the most interesting thing to be that the data told the guy I hadn't been doing much long easy base training without me ever having mentioned that to him. Isn't data great? For the record, that Armstrong guy supposedly had a W/kg of 6.75...

Well as I said, this is just the first chapter... where things went from here is to be continued...