{"id":3600,"date":"2026-08-30T17:15:45","date_gmt":"2026-08-30T16:15:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mywindsock.com\/page\/?p=3600"},"modified":"2026-08-30T17:15:45","modified_gmt":"2026-08-30T16:15:45","slug":"using-mywindsock-to-plan-your-intervals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mywindsock.com\/page\/discussion\/using-mywindsock-to-plan-your-intervals\/","title":{"rendered":"Using myWindsock to plan your intervals"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The interval sessions that appear in your training plan are sometimes in significant disagreement with the terrain around you. This can make route planning extremely difficult. The demands of races dictate your training sessions, but the demands of your training sessions can dictate your route. This blog will take you through how a training session can be planned using myWindsock. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The session we will plan today is a roughly 2.5 hour ride in Andorra with 12 x 3 minutes low cadence intervals with 1 minute between them. This means the climb needs to be long enough to do the whole block, steep enough to tolerate low cadence training but shallow enough that the rest in between is easy enough at a normal cadence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before the 12 x 3 minutes we have a warm up including 4 x 12s sprints with 48s rest and after the 12 x 3 minutes we have a 1 hour block of “zone 2” – so we’ll need a pretty much continuous up hill for that too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This is the session structure. But the tricky thing is the start point for the ride is at 1800m, so we need to get down low enough to start while still doing some warm up sprints (not downhill). As such, we’ll break the ride up into 3 points, warm up (20 minutes), 3 minute efforts (48 minutes) and zone 2 (60 minutes). <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The warm up <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The goal is to get down as low as possible between 20 and 30 minutes while finding a small climb to do the warm up sprints on. The warm up starts with 15 minutes easy pedalling, and the road down hill is quite easy to pedal the whole way down as it’s pretty straight and pretty wide, so we’ll pop that into myWindsock and see how far we can get in 15 minutes… <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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15 minutes of easy pedalling gets us here, almost to the entrance of the tunnel which is flat and a safe enough place to do the warm up sprints as there’s a nice wide bike path through it and, luckily, I don’t sprint very fast. One advantage of making the route with myWindsock is that it allows me to plan to go through the tunnel, whereas Strava’s route planning tool seems to think bikes aren’t allowed through it.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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myWindsock is predicting that we’ll get out the tunnel and have our 5 minutes post sprints recovery in just under 30 minutes. <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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By clicking the timeline at the bottom of the screen, we can add intervals. Adding in the sprints and recovery reduces our time estimate to the bottom of the climb to around 28 minutes. <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

3 minute efforts <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The bottom of the longer climbs the other side of the tunnel start at around 1200m above sea level. The intervals total 48 minutes and during this our rider will climb at a rate of 1100m\/hour so we need to gain around 900m for the duration of the intervals. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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myWindsock is now estimating that we’ll get to the turnaround point at 1:13 into the ride. Technically, the recovery after the intervals into the zone 2 is meant to be 5 minutes, but we’ll hit the descent and see how long it’ll take to get down. <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The Zone 2<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The pleasant way back is via the Col d’Ordino but this doesn’t take me an hour. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The myWindsock prediction has us getting to the bottom of Ordino at around 1:30 into the ride and we’ve got 60 minutes of zone 2 left to do. The zone 2 up hill will take up another 900m of elevation or so. <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

From Ordino town to the very top will take about 35 minutes and bring the total ride duration to just under 2 hours and 10. That means we need to descend down the other side and ride back up toward the starting point. We’ll be at the bottom of the descent two hours and 15 minutes into the ride with 25 minutes of up hill riding to go which conveniently will take me right to the front door of my favourite cafe. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The total elevation profile of the ride looks like this. Including descents the estimate is a total of 2:50 minutes which is a little longer than the planned session, but it’s a price worth paying to avoid going out and back.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

After planning the route in myWindsock, I’m able to send it directly to my bike computer as the two are connected. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can sign up to myWindsock<\/a> here to plan your training sessions perfectly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The interval sessions that appear in your training plan are sometimes in significant disagreement with the terrain around you. This can make route planning extremely difficult. The demands of races dictate your training sessions, but the demands of your training sessions can dictate your route. This blog will take you through how a training session … Continue reading “Using myWindsock to plan your intervals”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mywindsock.com\/page\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3600"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mywindsock.com\/page\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mywindsock.com\/page\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mywindsock.com\/page\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mywindsock.com\/page\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3600"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mywindsock.com\/page\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3610,"href":"https:\/\/mywindsock.com\/page\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3600\/revisions\/3610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mywindsock.com\/page\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mywindsock.com\/page\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mywindsock.com\/page\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}