For today’s ride I had the choice of either doing the optional Week 5 Day 5 of the Zwift 10-12 Week FTP Builder program, or a free ride.
The FTP Builder workout looked really low effort – effectively a recovery ride. It was several (not sure how many) repeats of 3 minutes at 124w as best I recall, for 45 minutes total. It didn’t really appeal.
I guess the other choice might have been to wait until later in the evening to take part in a Zwift Academy ride. But that risked me being too tired to ride. Today I switched to early starts at work, meaning I have been up since 5am… good God.
Therefore, I opted for the free ride, taking on Sand and Sequoias once again. Only this time I could put out as much (or as little) power as I could muster, rather than being constrained by ERG mode.
A combination of pent up energy from being sat either at a desk, or in traffic jams, meant I started much harder than usual.
By the time Fuego Flats sprint came around I really went for it. Whilst I could never have challenged first place, I did take my foot off the gas (so to speak) for the last ~2 seconds of the sprint, having heard something loud come from beneath the bike. It distracted me. I thought the boa lace thing had snapped on my shoe.
I think… though am not 100% sure, that in the end it was the USB / ANT+ dongle thing falling off from its precarious perch beneath the Tacx Neo.
All in all, I was pretty pleased with that performance. And I only gave myself a moments respite before jumping back on it.
There are various work outs that simulate this sort of activity. In a race it’s sometimes like this – push hard, and then no true recovery. So that’s what I tried to simulate here.
As ever I pushed hard to meet the 10km in 20 minutes or under time. I would have been severely disappointed had I not made this – after all, it was Fuego Flats.
Whilst the performance felt decent at the time, looking back at the stats tells me this one was nothing spectacular.
One really interesting point I’ve noticed lately is that I’m not feeling like I can push close to what I managed in that FTP Test. I have no idea how I was able to even achieve what I did that day, and it was nothing spectacular. If anything, I feel like I’ve fallen off from that as a high point.
Maybe it’s the lower effort exercises I’ve been doing as part of my FTP Builder schedule? I guess it could all be relative.
After thrashing myself to get as fast a time as possible for the 10km target, I gave myself plenty of recovery before hitting the Titans Grove KOM.
I knew from the previous ride that the first sign of the dinosaurs marks the bottom of the KOM, so was fairly well prepped.
Aside from knowing to set myself up for a good screenshot, I had no basis for how long this might take, nor truly how hard it might be.
The only prior time I’ve tackled Titans Grove KOM was as part of a structured workout. Gradients etc mean nothing in that mode.
One thing I could recall was that it never seemed to steeper than 5%. Knowing this, I set off to stay at or above my FTP for the ascent.
At various points there are some flatter parts and it’s hard to keep up a consistent pace due to setting the trainer difficulty to maximum realism. This may be to my detriment. Though from YouTube videos I’ve seen, I may just be kidding myself here.
Without any true prior performances I have no basis of reference here. I believe I could have done better. I imagine I could get in under 6 minutes. The first two thirds were out of the saddle, but the final third was a saddled slog.
After this I was pretty much bushed and ready to be off the bike. It’s been a long week already and I’m very conscious of over-doing it.
I tried to coast back down to the start / finish line, but there are a few small rollers to contend with along the way.
I saw various new sights on this run. The bear climbing the tree for the bee’s nest… very cool.
One thing I know I never covered was to show the L’Etape Du Tour cap I won for completing the Tour Mission a week or so ago.
How fancy.
I was not blown away by my stats on this ride. It clearly felt more impactful than it truly was, which is a bit disappointing.
That said, I don’t think doing more would have been a wise idea.
I’m intrigued as to why my timeline shows such a steady heartbeat during certain periods. I thought it might be playing up whilst I was riding, as it seemed to stay around 150bpm at some points where I would have expected it higher. And no, I don’t think it’s due to my increase in fitness, sadly.
Probably the most disappointing aspect of this ride was my 20 minute effort. A serious drop since my FTP test. I can’t say I went at it hell for leather, but I definitely felt like I’d given it harder than this.
Tomorrow I might opt to take it easy and complete that structured workout. Mentally, I’m feeling absolutely thrashed.
