Today’s ride was a mixture of good and bad. Let’s start with the bad.
I neglected to start my fan before riding. For the first 1-3km (the warm up), I find having the massive fan blasting in my face to be really quite annoying. My kids love to come in and watch whilst I’m spinning the pedals, so normally I can get one of them to do the honours.
Of course, today, they left me and went to watch TV.
As such I sweated. Quite a lot. Phew.
Second on my list of annoyances was the re-introduction of a phantom shift. I adjusted the tension on my front derailleur yesterday evening, as there was significant chain rubbing in the hardest / lowest three gears. I’ve now fixed this, but having this niggling little issue to resolve.
Thirdly, and most annoying of all, is the introduction of a weird clicking / popping sound on the right pedal. It only seems to happen when pushing around 150w or greater, and always as the right pedal is at 12 o’clock.
Having given the pedals a check over, they both seem firmly affixed. The noise doesn’t seem to happen in every gear. And it may be as a result of the left pedal being at 6 o’clock, rather than anything to do with the right pedal. It’s really quite frustrating. This started during yesterday’s ride, so it can’t be related to the derailleur adjustment. That’s something, at least.
Some quick maths:
- Average cadence: 67
- Ride time: 29:57 (let’s say 30 minutes)
- Estimated number of annoying clicks heard: 67*30 = 2010.
FFS.
The Good Stuff
It’s not all negative. There were a few good things from today’s ride.
Firstly, that’s 6 rides in a row, with the longest being 18.8 miles, or 30km if you’re French. The previous two rides (today and yesterday) have both been over 15km.
Riding 15km is now my expected normal. What I have done these previous two rides is to aim for the first 10km in under 20 minutes, which I have achieved on both. This is a decent milestone for me, and was one of my first cycling goals.
My aim for the first 10km is to ride at or above my guesstimated FTP, which as of today’s ride was 146w. With a 3 minute warm up, this works out at about 17 minutes riding at my FTP. Again, something I couldn’t have handled just a few weeks ago.
I got two shiny new achievements. The first being Fan Club. I’m all about giving Ride Ons. I think anyone who gets on their bike and does some exercise before work should be encouraged.
The second achievement I unlocked today was Sprinter Apprentice. Unfortunately I didn’t get a screenshot of this (as I was panting like a dog), but this means I finally put out over 500w.
Across the board, my wattage was effectively a new Personal Best. It didn’t feel any more taxing than yesterday’s ride, and if anything, I was 3 seconds off yesterdays 10km pace. But I’ll take it.
The 516w I managed to put out were used for the sprint. I managed my best time, by almost a full second. Pretty pleased with this. Next stop is into the 14s range. Only the first 12 are proper attempts.
The end of ride report for today shows the first 10km of effort. Then there’s a recovery section, and you can see a big dip where I found the phantom shift in the higher gears.
I find it very confusing how Zwift says I did an average of 137w, whilst Strava has me down for 149w. Watts that all aboot?
There’s a third graph which Zwift gives at the end of each ride, and I have no idea what it means. But today, my orange line was bang on the grey line for most of the ride. I’m guessing that’s good? Or maybe that’s showing my overall best performance? Who the heck knows.
Lastly for today I got another bump in my guesstimated FTP. Hoorah.
To quote everyone’s favourite Swedish dwarf:
Hard Vork Pays Orf.
Torbjörn
Rest day tomorrow. Back on Saturday for a 20-25km ride.