After yesterday’s jaunt up Box Hill, I wasn’t sure what kind of ride to do this morning. I figured a structured work out may be the best thing to do, rather than my typical free ride.
A few weeks back I was a bit put off Zwift’s structured workouts, as most of them take more than 30 minutes. Heck, the one that does take 30 minutes broke me. Having now been riding fairly regularly for the past three weeks, the prospect of a 45+ minute ride isn’t quite as daunting.
That said, I had no idea how I would fare riding for 2x 15 minute intervals at my current FTP – 142w. There really is only one way to find out. And that’s to ride.
Things started off rarther jovially. A nice, gentle, but steadily increasing warm up from about 85w to 110w.
And then boom. With a prompt to keep up my cadence at around 90-100rpm, I figured the next 15 minutes were going to be quite intense.
I remember looking down at the countdown clock, realised only 2.5 minutes had gone by and I felt quite painful already. No bother, only 7.5 minutes to go… until I looked a little harder, and realised it was a 15 minute interval, not a 10 minute interval. Such fun.
In truth it wasn’t so bad. After the initial shock of realising that yet again, I had forgotten something vital before starting my ride – a towel – my wife came to my rescue and I focussed on the latest addition to my setup – the Zwift Companion App.
On yesterday’s ride I got stung by two different issues with the app. The first is that the Zwift Companion App only works in portrait mode. And my GorillaPod GripTight thingy is most easily used in Landscape. Amazing. With a bit of effort, I have now adjusted the GorillaPod to keep my phone in Landscape mode. Great Success.
The other thing that happened yesterday was that my phone ran out of battery about 8km into the ride. Fail. Today I made sure I was plugged in to the mains.
The Zwift Companion App seemingly works differently in Workout Mode vs Free Ride mode. In Free Ride, from what I have very briefly seen, you get a nice map and a list of other riders nearby. In Workout Mode, you get a dial which shows the Wattage range you need to be in, and a timer counting down your current interval. It’s something to focus on, if nothing else.
There were a couple of interesting additional points for me today. The first was I kept up the highest cadence, by far, of any ride I have done as of yet.
The second was that although I intended to have an easier day today, after the hard ride yesterday, I ended up riding further in overall distance (20.78km) and time (55m 7s). Definitely going to have a slightly easier free ride session tomorrow.
Keeping my cadence high was a really interesting challenge. I’ve noticed I tend to use the big ring all the time at the front, and maybe only four or five gears at the back. This seems to be enough. Today I used the smaller ring at the front, which seemed to help keep a higher cadence. I’m not sure how this factors in with ERG mode though.
At the moment I can’t tell if I prefer the free rides, or the workouts. I definitely enjoy the freedom of going hard (or softer) on the free rides. But I like the guided approach of the work outs. I don’t have 40-60 minutes to ride on most weekday mornings, so maybe I will restrain from these types of rides unless it’s a weekend.
I made some changes to my rider appearance on Zwift. I splashed out my earned Zwift Bucks on a Specialized Allez bike, matching my real world setup with my in game setup. It’s the cheapest bike in the Specialzed range in Zwift’s drop store. Whatever. I don’t see how changing kit has any impact on the game. All just vanity?
There are two final things I noticed after reading the Reddit Zwift subreddit yesterday. The first is that I’ve had my Zwift goal set to “ride California”, whatever that means, whereas I probably should have been set to ride Everest. Oops.
The other thing is that if you use the Zwift Companion App, you can press your big white circle on the map, and this will give a Ride On! to everyone in your local vicinity. What I hadn’t realised, until yesterday, is just what a total pain in the arse it is to give a Ride On. I figured I just clicked the thumb icon in game, but no. To give a Ride On is really fiddly, you need to select a rider from the ever moving list of riders around you, and then give them the thumb. Bit difficult for me, with my current setup. This new way should mean my Ride On distribution becomes significantly increased from it’s current Zero.
I’ve earned 1.1 pizza slices from my ride today. Being that it’s Mother’s Day, and we’re off out for an Italian, I guess I’ll be bringing the other 7 slices home in a take out box.