The moral of the story is:
It’s OK to have the occasional easy ride.
Chris – an indoor cyclist
I’m super guilty of pushing myself every ride. My efforts might not be comparatively extreme compared to some / most(?) Zwifters, but for me, as a noob, I tend to want to push myself on every ride.
It only dawned on me, this morning as I was riding, that I have never yet had an easy ride. By easy I mean 90% grey, blue, or green zones. Today, I changed that.
I wanted to ride yesterday, but my legs hurt. They felt tender, not ruined. I rode too hard on Tuesday evening. Silly me.
With a day’s enforced rest, I wanted to get back on the bike this morning but not in any intense fashion. Since my Tour of Watopia Stage 3 crashed out on me, I’ve wanted to complete Jon’s Mix for my own sake. That seemed like a good way to spend an hour this morning. But those opening high intensity bursts would have been a really bad idea for my muscles.
It was Box Hill that mucked up my muscles, and today I found myself back on the hill. I have a tendency to end up climbing this hill, even if it’s sometimes unexpected. On a workout it’s not a true climb, and amusingly, even though I rode for ages this morning, I didn’t actually get to the top.
My aim for this ride was to keep a high cadence – 100rpm or so – in both the blue and green zones. I was in an easy gear, and for some of the early intervals, I was on the front bottom ring. This wasn’t a sweaty ride. Even so, it was enjoyable. Not killing myself can be fun.
I’m guessing these rides are more intense for people with a much higher FTP than me.
I’m likely not going to ride again this evening. Even with this low intensity ride today, I feel like I did enough for what my legs can handle. As I’ve said before, I’d rather ride 7 days in a row at low intensity than 2 days at high intensity.
One cool thing to happen this ride was reaching Level 10. This means, as best I am aware, some new unlocked routes on Watopia.
For what it’s worth, to get to this point it’s taken me just under 24 hours riding to get to this point. That’s 24 hours of riding / exercise I would never have done had I not bought the bike (and all the other associated bits). My only regret is not buying the bike sooner.
As I wasn’t pushing myself hell for leather, I had time to do some thinking this morning. Some of this was on various issues I have going on in my life right now (nothing major!), and some of my thoughts were around how to run Zwift more effectively on a tech front.
Right now, I’m running Zwift on my iPad. It’s not the latest model iPad – maybe two to three years old. The graphics, as I have moaned about before, look … ahem, like Minecraft. This has no bearing on getting a good workout from Zwift, but it could be much more aesthetically pleasing.
I’m really unsure as to which way to go with my Zwift tech stack. After some tinkering just now, I know the running Zwift via VirtualBox is just not going to happen. Annoyingly, I have more than enough graphics power in both of my PC’s to run Zwift on ultra settings at 4k (thanks for the benchmarks: Zwiftalizer) but no easy way to rejig my home office setup to put either PC next to my bike.
Ideally I do not want to spend several hundred of pounds on yet more tech kit – as I no longer do any gaming aside from Zwift. But I can’t swap my graphics cards around either, as the more modern Nvidia cards don’t have two DVI-D ports. Why?!?! Arghh.
The alternative to all this is to buy a new Macbook, but they are super expensive, have terrible keyboards, and awful connectivity. Why is life so unfair? Boo hoo. First world problems.
Anyway, I couldn’t have said it better myself. Though I might be back before the weekend for another hour on the bike.