Hoorah, the final day of this years Advent of Cycling challenge is finally here. My legs are eternally grateful. And by eternally I mean until Tuesday when I will no doubt be riding again.
Still, two days rest. Hard earned. I realised yesterday that this challenge wasn’t actually 24 days long either, it has been twenty four days of December and the last two days of November. Some may even say it has been 26 days. And those people would be… mathematicians.
Finishing off then, today I picked the Wave Rider workout from Zwift’s Less than 30 minutes to burn category, which I have, I think, now done close to all the available choices.
This turned out to be a fairly intensive workout – more so than I expected.
Rather than me explain the intervals, I feel this graphic from WhatsOnZwift does a sterling job:
For me this would be:
- 15 seconds @ 370w
- 5 minute ramp from 215w to 230w
Regular readers will know, this was not the intended ride for today.
What I wanted to do was head out into the real world, go down to Preston town centre and see the Christmas Tree in Winkley Square. It’s not anything special, but I did that as the last ride in the Advent of Cycling challenge in 2020, and it felt like a good way to end this one.
The problem is that I went out yesterday for my first outdoors ride in ages… and I got soaked. Totally drenched. Whilst I have plenty of spare clothes, I don’t have spare outdoor shoes, shoe covers, or gloves. And all of them were still very wet this morning.
Alas, indoors it was to be.
This workout is basically a shorter version of the Sweet Spot Training workout. It’s fairly full on, and I wasn’t intending to do anything this strenous today. My stats for the week are the highest of any of the last four, and I still have a day to spare… though thankfully I’m not riding tomorrow.
For a change.
As with the usual SST session there is no rest here. The 15 seconds @ 110rpm are hard enough to get the heart rate rapidly rising, and then it’s recovering at a 3.3w/kg and upwards.
It’s actually a fairly solid workout for race training – as many of the prompts talk about.
My favourite prompt, however, was easily this one:
Definitely not intended to be taken the way I took it.
With the crappy last few months I’ve had at work, it did make me laugh. Not that I do hit the bottle, so to speak, but honestly I could relate to that mindset given some of the days I endured.
In some ways though, doing a structured workout was a nice way to finish this one off.
Watopia was packed with a lot of big groups taking early chunks out of their Rapha Festive 500 targets. I tell you what, rather them than me. As taxing as doing 24 (or 26) rides in a row has been, I couldn’t imagine doing 500km in 8 days. That is brutal. Full respect.
But seeing the on-screen prompts talking about the last four minutes, then the last two, down to the last one… and finally seeing that arch, yeah it was nice to have something visual to represent the finish line.
I’d actually do this workout again for sure, if I were time crunched down from 50 minutes (the usual SST) and wanted to get in a sweet spot session in a condensed time. It’s a good one. My fatigued legs could barely take it.
So yeah, that’s me done.
Rest days now, and well earned I feel.
I think next up is the fourth and final race in Zwift’s Race Like A Pro series. But you know what? I might push that back till Wednesday.
It is Christmas after all.
