Well, bobbins. All my good plans: scuppered. My idea today was to do the 17:30 3R Pedal Play Interval ride. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten about my eldest child swimming lessons, which too begin at 17:30. The reason I was able to attend the last time was because of swimming shutting during covid. D’oh.
Now, potentially, I may be able to attend this ride next Tuesday as kids swimming has now shut for Christmas. Good news. Anyway, this did mean that today I was off hunting for a ride to fit into a shorter time slot. What with having to look after my youngest whilst the eldest went swimming, it meant no riding after work as planned.
That led me to look for something I could squeeze in during the work day. Which led me to 30 minutes of Lactate Shuttling.
This is a fairly intensive ride. What’s involved?
Well, it started with me unlocking the “work from home” achievement. 14 consecutive days Zwifting. Getting that as you start the ride on the 15th day is a bit odd, but that’s Zwift for you. This used to be called the “unemployed” achievement, I’m sure. Whatever.
- 3 minutes @ 100rpm, 120% FTP
- 8 x the following
- 1 minute @ 85rpm, 70% FTP,
- 1 minute @ 95rpm, 110% FTP
- 1 minute @ 100rpm, 120% FTP
Somewhat unusually for Zwift, at least from my personal experience, is that this is structured in such a way that the “off” interval comes first. This makes it a bit misleading when you look at the number of efforts remaining. A mistake I made far too early in this one.
After the 8 minute warm up ramp from 50-75% of FTP its straight into that first interval. It’s not so bad. After all, you’re fresh enough. And with the intro text on screen for most of it, you’re somewhat preoccupied and it’s almost 2 minutes gone before you know where you are.
From there you get a recovery period of a minute at, in my case, 160w at 85rpm.
My challenge to myself was to get my heart rate back down to 160 bpm. Sounds high, which it is, but for me, that’s a good place to be.
What I’m always conscious of with workouts like these, is that nasty place of starting the next set at a higher heart rate than my “default”.
So for me, 160bpm is about average for a higher intensity workout.
Ideally I wanted to reset back to around 160bpm during each “off” minute, so I’d go into the next “on” minute from a similar starting point.
I mostly managed this. I got down to around 161bpm on the first few, but later on I was hovering around 162-164bpm. Not great, but not so bad that I was blowing up.
I fully expected the final effort to be the hardest part of the workout.
Ending on an “on” block is one thing, but then having to ramp up again for the second minute surely would be killer.
But alas, no.
The first three minutes, for me, were the hardest part of this workout. The rest was mostly a mental discipline exercise.
In my head I had it that I’d managed a 20 minute stint at around this pace to earn at 238w FTP earlier in the year. If I couldn’t do one minute efforts at this pace, it was a poor do.
Anyway, I finished up but needed to be off the bike for my next work meeting so didn’t have a huge amount of time to cool down.
I took an extra 3 minutes over the allocated 30.
What I had hoped to do was get my heart rate down from the high I finished on, down to about 120bpm before getting off the bike. I figure that would be no problem within a 5 minute gap.
Alas, no. I couldn’t do it. As I finished the ride, my heart rate wouldn’t seem to drop below 140bpm. How odd. I was only at 100w or so. Maybe it was the ~90rpm cadence. I really don’t know.
All in, a decent workout. I’m not looking forward to its bigger brother in the Zwift Academy series, I have to say.
