An interesting one today, for three different reasons. I’m only going to talk about one of them in this post, as the other two deserve a post of their own.
It seems like lately every ride is a new map. Or a new route. Or a new route on a new map. Today was no different.
Today’s route was the rather unimaginatively named “Stage 3” on MyWhoosh’s UCI World. This is the same map as last week, but a different route – you can’t see the other route from this one. I guess they are purely designed for races. This one would be a tough one to race, for sure.
Once more I did this one on my older gaming PC, so working at the lower graphics settings. But this one looked pretty good regardless, and was pretty much 30 fps throughout. That’s the frame rate cap, so means the performance was really good, never jerking about or stuttering, etc.
I’m still not at a stage where I want to push too hard. I looked at a few different workouts before settling on Rolling Hills #3. This one comes in at 58 minutes 30 seconds, so is the longest ride I’ve completed since my return.
However, the TSS was something like 47, if I recall, so whilst longer than recent rides, it wasn’t necessarily overly taxing. Again, it’s all about a slow and steady build back up. I’m in no major rush to push myself.
What I will say is that yes, this one wasn’t overly intensive.
But as the next post will show, it was 8% harder than it might look. A pretty specific number. Again, more on that to follow.
I never massively enjoy cadence work, and wasn’t aware this ride had any until I got underway.
There was a slow ramp up to begin, and then 5 minutes at tempo. Nothing too difficult there.
After this were 5 repeats where I was asked to do the tempo blocks at a higher cadence than “was otherwise comfortable”. Or words to that effect. I picked ~100rpm as best I recall, and went at it. That certainly got a sweat going, but I wasn’t overly taxed.
Then came the lion’s share of the day’s work.
MyWhoosh doesn’t do a good job of explaining cadence targets. The first interval had a prompt on screen – hit the cadence target of 70rpm.
After that, I wasn’t sure what cadence I was supposed to be at. Was it still 70rpm, or was it not set if the prompt didn’t say?
I think it was 70rpm for all.
However, I decided to do alternating blocks at 70rpm, and then 5rpm higher. So 70rpm for the first, 75rpm for the second, back to 70rpm for the third, then 80rpm for the fourth. And so on.
Doing that actually helped kill the time pretty well, because trying to dial in that cadence took quite a lot of (not always successful) effort.
I did the final two blocks at 70rpm also, where the duration jumped from 1.5 minutes up to 3 minutes.
After this, I used the last 2 minute endurance block to get my breath back. Because from then on I went into a little ‘science’ mode. But that is going to be my second post – probably due Monday at this rate, unless the creative inspiration strikes me to write tomorrow.
Also then I had a chance to record a strange, but fairly regularly heard noise coming from the bike which I still can’t identify. So I will make a third post about that.
As I say, a busy ride today.
I’m off out for a walk tomorrow morning. That’s me done with riding for the week. I said last week I wouldn’t mind a rain walk. It didn’t rain. It has, however, rained like Billy-O (whoever that is) for the past few days. And is due to do so again, tomorrow. If it rains like that, I may very well regret asking for it. Still gunna go though.
