Advent of Cycling – Day 21 – Two Bridges Loop

Ho ho ho, only 3 more rides to go. For my 21st consecutive ride I opted for two new things:

A new route: Two Bridges Loop
A new workout: Pre-Training Plan

The workout might have been done out of sequence. I’m somewhat passed the pre-training stage at this point. But I did the workout anyway as its one of only two remaining in the ‘less than 60 minutes’ workouts that I haven’t yet completed.

The idea of this workout is that it should be done as an introductory ride, before starting one of the Zwift training plans, to ensure your FTP is set to an accurate level.

This workout consists of:

10 minute warm up, ramping from 25-65% of FTP
5 minutes @ 65% FTP (Zone 1 / blue)
2 minutes free ride
4 minutes @ 80% FTP (Zone 2 / green)
2 minutes free ride
3 minutes @ 95% FTP (Zone 3 / yellow)
2 minutes free ride
2 minutes @ 109% FTP (Zone 4 / orange)
2 minutes free ride
1 minute @ 125% FTP (Zone 5 / red)
2 minutes free ride

And done.

I have to say that the on-screen terminology used in this ride is confusing.

Zone 1 is 65%, but this is above the 55% most other sites I’ve seen that would classify as active recovery.

Likewise, what Zwift calls Endurance (Zone 2) would be Tempo on other sites. And this goes on, and on.

This factor led me to believe a lot of my Zone 1 rides were recovery, when in fact I was putting pressure on the pedals. As best I understand it, AR should be an almost “free spin” – barely any resistance at all.

Anyway, maybe you don’t care about any of this stuff. I just find it a bit misleading.

The prompts in this ride come fairly few and far between, and when they do come, they come in big blocks of text that are a bit tricky to read.

Some of the information given is a little contradictory also. I’m not really sure how valuable the generic on-screen blurb would be to a beginner who may or may not understand much about terms like FTP and threshold, and things of that nature.

Maybe I have misunderstood the purpose of this workout.

Looking at it from a pure workout perspective, it fared OK. I wouldn’t do it again any time soon, but at 373 calories burned in ~40 minutes, with the equivalent of a 15 minute warm up, it wasn’t a complete waste of time.

The other point to today’s ride was to check out the new section of Watopian road available during the Two Bridges Loop.

I’ve been checking out the other new routes late last week, and have to say this is the smallest of the bunch. It’s about 500m, if that.

A small dirt track cutting half way between the Reverse Hilly KOM, back to midway up the Forward Hilly KOM. But the route puts you on the descent, so you don’t climb twice.

There’s nothing that exciting about this route, I’m sorry to say.