Day 3 of my made up Advent Of Cycling, and today I went for a dinner time tempo session. After some chatter with my wife yesterday, it seemed like she was under the assumption I’d be pushing a bit harder now – given it was two to three weeks ago that we were both smacked down again with illness.
Maybe I’ve been taking it too easy. I don’t know. Honestly the last time I had a harder session (ramps up to tempo), later in the evening I had a really bad sore throat.
Well, thankfully, not so today. Hopefully that’s a really good sign.
At least it means I can handle tempo sessions. So, with that in mind, and with the previous approach being to build back up to harder efforts at a more gradual pace, I think the next few rides can be tempo efforts, much like this one.
Trying to find Zwift workouts that focus purely on tempo for an hour or so is actually pretty tricky. There’s lots with tempo thrown in, but nothing that seems to focus exclusively on that power zone.
Somewhat annoyingly, I found a really suitable looking workout under Zwift’s Back To Fitness plan. But for whatever reason, these workouts are not available as a standalone effort. You have to do them as part of the full Plan.
That sucks.
So, I ended up rather hastily creating my own.
Though it represented a bit oddly on Zwift, the plan was a 5 minute ramp up to 170w, then 5 minutes at 170w.
This was followed by 3 minutes off, at 115w.
Then:
- 5 minutes at 185w
- 5 minutes at 115w
Repeated 4x.
Followed by a 5 minute cool down.
Given that the endurance effort ran at 170w, the step up to 185w wasn’t much noticable.
And I kept an eye on my heart rate throughout – maxing out at 152bpm, but mostly in the mid to high 140s during the tempo intervals. This was of no concern to me – if anything it felt fairly laid back. Typically my workouts used to be done with a 170+bpm so this is all good.
Anyway, Friday would usually be my rest day. But no rest for the wicked this month. I’m going to take an easier ride tomorrow – 30 minutes during my dinner break. Spin out the legs. Still likely to keep it structured just to stop myself going silly, but probably nothing above endurance. Maybe even entirely AR. Who knows. I’ll see how I feel.
