For this evening’s ride I wanted to hit up the next Zwift Academy 2019 ride, which would have been workout number 5 – the one minute effort.
However, I didn’t have an hour to spare. Turns out that kids going back to school mean the roads are busier, and combined with wet weather meant I was over 15 minutes later home than expected. Deep joy. Hopefully tomorrow night the weather will be better, but I am not overly hopefully what with Autumn essentially upon us.
I decided to ride Emily’s Short Mix, probably the best 30 minute ride in terms of bang for buck (imho) on Zwift.
I thought I’d chosen to ride the short circuit on Innsbruck. Alas, no. I had instead opted for one of the climbs.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as you don’t feel the climb as such when doing a Zwift ERG mode workout. But it does mean I didn’t work through the kilometers quite as much as I’d have liked.
Working deliberately, I aimed to keep my cadence under greater control than usual during this run. However, I still managed to find myself over 100rpm a few times. Ideally I’m aiming for between 85-95rpm, as per instruction from the Zwift Academy tutorials.
After yesterday’s ride I started with fairly tired legs. Not overly so, but definitely more tense today than at the start of yesterday’s ride.
Even so, I found that I managed to work fairly easily (maybe not the right word) through the first two blocks. I managed to convince myself that 1:30 at 150w + 3 minutes at 170w was really 4.5 minutes of good solid off the gas recovery, and mentally that worked well.
Unfortunately I definitely struggled in the final 2 minutes of the last 3 minute @ 230w block.
I put in a full minute out of the saddle, which I’d really rather work to avoid. This, I feel, can only help me during the FTP test. Also, out of the saddle tends to mean grinding, whereas keeping a higher cadence definitely feels easier in ERG mode.
That said, after keeping the pedals turning for all that time, it is exhausting on that final block, particularly the final two minutes.
Once done, I found out tea wouldn’t be ready for another 20 minutes, so put in a rather choppy performance climbing the remainder of Innsbruck’s reverse KOM.
I figured out – after the fact – that whilst Zwift won’t display your wattage / heart rate on screen during a paused workout, it does show you this information still in the workout panel on the Zwift companion app. This will be handy for future rides.
It was hard going getting to the top. But I made it, there or there abouts.
Partly I did this for the extra exercise, but also partly to gain the extra KM’s on the descent.
With the climb and descent out of the way, I was over 45 minutes in so switched the workout back on to end the cooldown.
Overall I was happy with today’s workout. Whilst my legs feel tired now, I’m still thinking I’m going to ride again tomorrow – all things being well with traffic etc.
I’m hoping to ride that Zwift Academy #5 workout tomorrow, all being well. That one looks interesting.
I’m happy with the ~460 calories of work on this one. Definitely need more rides like this over the next few weeks.
