Not for the first time in my cycling career, I accidentally “knackered up” my knee on my previous ride. This was entirely caused by either an adjustment I made to my left cleat position, or raising my saddle height by a centimeter. Or… both. Never make two changes at the same time. When will I learn?
With three days off the bike I was absolutely itching to get back on. I very nearly rode yesterday, but decided it would likely be a bad idea. The knee pain wasn’t overly bad, but it was bad enough to not want to chance it.
Today things felt generally much better, but it’s still not 100%. I figured I’d go on and do one of the longer, lower intensity FTP Builder sessions, so opted for Week 9 Day 1, which is 2×25 minutes at 135w. I figured this would be a great way to burn some of the calories down, whilst restricting the likelihood of doing any damage by putting too much stress / strain on the joint.
Things generally went well. I definitely felt a little tenderness in the knee to begin with, but it settled down and I figured it was probably safe to continue.
Whilst off the bike I did some inspections and have noticed my chain is starting to look really rusty. This is 100% due to all the sweat constantly dropping on it, I’m sure. Also, I have never lubed it since I bought the bike. Need to remedy this, pronto.
Another technical issue occurred during this ride: constant heart rate monitor drop outs. Fairly sure the battery was on it’s way out. Have replaced after the ride. It doesn’t seem like that long since it last went either. Saddens me that these little batteries are just going to end up in a land fill polluting the planet.
The big mistake on this ride came in the form of me skipping my workout mid second block.
I am responsible for this – of course – but Zwift should really make a prompt or something for accidentally skipping the block. The space bar skips blocks. Stupid. I accidentally pressed space whilst alt+tabbing out to read a blog whilst I was riding. Like I say, my fault, but poor UX.
After this I tried, rather poorly, to maintain a steady workout pacing but it was almost impossible. Frustrating really as I definitely ended up going too hard, which could have been disastrous.
Towards the end of the ride I decided to give it the beans on the 200m sprint.
I should say that at this point I was feeling absolutely fine. Having done 50km I was fairly sure my knee, whilst not perfect, was about as rested as it was likely to be, so why not see if was up to a proper test?
Bit silly.
The noises coming from the bike during this sprint greatly concerned me. I’m still not 100% convinced I’ve set it all up properly, even after all this time. Anyway, I managed, briefly, to hit 10w/kg, which was nice.
The main thing for me today was to do a good long session on the bike. I’d have liked to have gone a touch longer, but some real world commitments came in towards the end of the ride. I had phone calls to make, and the tea to prepare, so I decided to call it a day at 50km.
I could definitely tell I’d had a prolonged rest period. I felt really good on the bike, really strong even after the first hour. Messing up the workout was frustrating, but doing some real ups and downs was a good thing in the end, in terms of making sure my knee was “back to normal”. Fairly sure that’s the case, though will find out for certain tomorrow, I imagine.
Having not been on the bike yet this week, it was really nagging it me that my daily averages in terms of burned calories – all towards that Zwift 10k calorie January challenge – was creeping up higher and higher.
I now expect to ride for the next 3 days as well as this ride, with Sunday being the first ride of the Tour of Zwift 2020. If I can push 500 calories or greater on each ride, I should be OK for being just about back on track, I think.
It’s funny really. Thinking back to this time last year, I can’t imagine thinking going three days without exercise would have driven me to such a state of frustration. I definitely prefer it like this.
