Another day, another tough workout.
And not actually the workout I had planned, but one that was very, very similar.
The one I picked out yesterday over on WhatsOnZwift is called “Boogie”, in their Zwift Racing category. Allegedly that’s a workout included with Zwift. And maybe it was, but maybe they’ve dropped it in their recent UI redesign.
Anyway, by sheer good luck (I think) I found the 40/20’s Into Threshold workout which is – as best I can tell – the same workout, albeit with a slightly different opening effort. In other words, when it came down to the meat of the hard work today, there was no difference between the one I had planned and the one I actually did.
Lucky me.
According to WhatsOnZwift, the training stress score for this one sits at 67.
Yesterday’s Spaded Sweetie came in at 75, and an SST session would be 66.
I chose this one because the stress score was so similar to an SST session.
However, coming off the back of a previous day’s hard workout, would that feel any worse? That was the question I had in mind going in to this one.
The interesting part about this workout was the 10 minute breather in between the two interval blocks.
Prior to starting, that made me think either it would be easier than expected – a lovely long recovery making it seem like two individual workouts.
Or, more likely, the first block would be so brutal you’d need 10 minutes to come to terms with your poor life choices.
Starting out there was a variation on the usual Zwift warm up. For the first five minutes it was simply ride at 50% FTP, or 125w. Nice and easy.
The on screen prompts suggested using this time to vary up your cadence. I’m pretty bad for sitting at 95rpm when given no prompts, so decided to do a minute at 60rpm, and then a minute at 105rpm.
After that there was 5 repeats of:
- 5x 30sec @ 90rpm, 65% FTP
- 5x 30sec @ 95rpm, 80% FTP
Nothing really untoward there. Just enough to get the heart rate moving upwards. I guess that was a taste of things to come.
Of course the real work today were those two big nasty 14 minute blocks of fun.
The one saving grace was that the threshold intervals, whilst 10 minutes long, were only at 95% FTP. Something to look forward too. Sarcasm aside, that’s better than 10 minutes at FTP anyway.
On the first set of anaerobics the one thing that caught me off guard was the final repeat. I’d assumed, wrongly, that we’d jump from 121% FTP into the 10 minute effort.
Not so.
You actually get a 20 second breather between each effort, which also carries over to the last effort… obvious really. But I mention it as like I say, it caught me off guard as I’d intentionally kept the spun up legs to keep my momentum, and then the ERG mode dropped the resistance down dramatically, which can genuinely risk an injury.
So pay attention 🙂
Falling into the 10 minute block was hardest for the first two minutes. With effort already in the legs, the whole point of the workout was around clearing lactate, and as best I can tell that’s most difficult coming off the back of some hard efforts. I never felt too bad during the first block.
And so we went into the ten minutes of recovery. Ahh the easy life.
Not gunna lie, cockiness crept in and within 2-3 minutes of that rest block I was eager to get stuck in again. That was partly because I felt fine, and partly because I wanted everything done with for the day.
Well, turns out those 10 minutes passed fairly quickly… particularly the final 3 when suddenly I was a lot less sure about my desire to work hard again, and boom, we were back into it.
If I had to moan about something today I’d say it feels very lacking when a workout uses the same interval blocks, and it’s so obvious the person who made the workout was busy exercising their ctrl+c, ctrl+v abilities. Vary it up a little, please!
The second set of anaerobics definitely felt harder than the first. Boy, 20 seconds of recovery is never enough. Why couldn’t it be 20 on, 40 off? Mean.
At least I corrected my mistake of over egging the final recovery. Yeah, definitely managed to get down to 80rpm for the full 20 there 🙂
That second 10 minute threshold block was brutal though.
We might have been in yellow territory on Zwift, but the air around me was firmly blue. Good thing the kids were at school.
The hardest part was staying around the 90rpm mark as instructed. It just feels so much harder to me than 95rpm.
So I was glad to get through this one, and I definitely felt worked. It felt on a par with yesterday, even though I burned 20 less calories over the same duration. So I definitely worked a bit harder yesterday, but today’s felt more draining.
As above, that’s probably not a fair representation of this one because I was already tired. But even so, considering the difference in stress scores, there wasn’t a huge difference in the overall calories burned.
Thankfully that’s me done for the week(days).
Next up I think I’m going to take another Pace Partner ride with coco. Something easy. That will be Saturday, followed maybe by a B cat Pace Partner ride on Sunday. I really wanna make it to the hour mark on that one.
