A cool experience

Ever since I started road biking I have always wanted to get my VO2 Max tested. If you don't know VO2 Max is the maximum amount of oxygen that your body can take up from the air around you and use to help your muscles make energy. Getting a VO2 max tested doesn't really help in designing specific training plans but is nice to know what your endurance capability is. One website that I was looking at put it this way,
"Top endurance athletes (eg: marathon runners) usually have a very high VO2 Max, usually measuring around 70 ml/kg/min. The average person has a VO2 Max of around 35 ml/kg/min. "

People like Lance Armstrong and other ultra super-human athletes usually have a VO2 in the 80s or low 90s.
So yesterday I finally got a chance to get my VO2 done. We have a good friend Cassie who is studying Exercise Science at Truman State University here in town. She arranged it with a professor that she works with to come up to their lab yesterday afternoon. Here is a good website about VO2 testing with a picture of what the test looks like (except I was on a bike and not a treadmill). The test was pretty short, only about 7 min of real work, but with a warm up and cool down took around 45 minutes. The point is to exercise the subject to exhaustion so it gets pretty strenuous. It was tough, not really a "fun" experience although it was really cool to push myself that hard and see what I can do. Well, I wasn't dissapointed. I got a good result that I am happy with. The professor wants me to come back in a couple months to demo a real test for his students so it will be cool to see if I will make any improvment in my max in the next couple months. Hopefully I can use this capacity to do well in some races this year...

The full report: