Right then readers, second time with The Sufferfest, and I definitely had a better time of it today. Annoyingly I screenshotted my settings, but I appear to have either deleted, or somehow completely lost that particular shot. As best I recall, I used the Favero Assioma Duo pedals for two things, and the Tacx Neo 2 for the other two. I couldn’t tell you which and what, sadly, but I definitely didn’t use the third item – which I think is my Garmin head unit. As everything is represented by a number, rather than a name, it’s really rather inconvenient.
I’m going to keep this as a true ride report, rather than a further review of The Sufferfest as a platform. This will come, but as a separate ‘thing’. I would like to compare and contrast TSF with Zwift, as I think there’s a lot to both platforms, but this ride write up isn’t the particular place to do that.
After Tuesday’s ride I have to say I felt extremely frustrated.
Aside from all the technical problems I kinda anticipated when changing platforms, the really annoying thing was that I barely covered any distance. I think I came in around 18km or something. Combine that with Wednesday’s better ride, that got me to around 50km on the week. A far cry from the 100km weekly riding goal.
Then things went really off grid and unplanned on Wednesday evening, so that put paid to cycling on Thursday, as I was frankly, knackered. On Friday night I just wanted a beer, not a bike ride. I’d had enough activity for the week.
I saw merit to the FTP Over-Unders: 3 sets 8 x 1 workout on Tuesday’s ride. My issues were all technical, rather than with the activity itself. Therefore I was determined to get the tech stuff sorted, and actually complete the workout.
I’m happy to report I managed that today.
That’s not to say I didn’t have tech problems, but I did manage to learn a bunch of things about how the platform differs from Zwift, and how its control of the hardware seems different, and then adapt my workout accordingly.
Again, I don’t want to dive too deeply into that, but the crux of it seems to be ERG mode works differently, or certainly not identically to how Zwift’s workouts behave. There’s a stronger requirement on the rider to control the pace, perhaps change gears, and change the pace / power applied through the pedals.
Once I understood this, I managed to perform approximately inline with the way the workout intended me to ride.
I did have a few mid-ride blips. One of these was to muck around with the various icons and settings, albeit without really being able to see what I was doing. As such, according to the ride stats, I hit a max power of 1512W.
Let me tell you, I absolutely did not.
If we disregard the two platforms for a moment, this workout seemed approximately comparable to the Zwift SST session.
What I will say is that the Zwift session comes out at more calories burned, and feels harder, but nevertheless, this one was decent and my kind of ride. I could certainly see myself doing this one over and over.
The biggest downside today is that when I finished the workout, I wanted to continue. Now I could keep pedalling and track the ride on the Garmin head unit, and that would have been fine. But the kilometres on screen wouldn’t keep ticking up. That was disappointing.
The one other thing today would be to say that all this talk of suffering, of “beating my ass today to kick yours tomorrow” – that’s not me. Not at all.
I don’t ride to suffer. I ride for the enjoyment of it. I like to push myself, but it’s to push myself not to beat on, or be able to beat others. I get it, it’s for competitive cyclists. But it makes me question how much of the market they alienate with that approach? By comparison Zwift is all fluffy and welcoming… and vastly more successful for it, as best I can tell.
Still, I don’t say this as a bad thing against the platform. I like that they have this strong opinion and ideal behind the platform, and I appreciate it’s me that perhaps doesn’t belong here.
All that said, I did enjoy it. I want to try more. And I will be back.
I want to try a couple more workouts first, make sure I have this control issue sorted – I think I do, but I’d like a higher level of confidence – and then this week ahead, it’s 4DP time. Oh baby.
