It’s Halloween and Zwift has fully embraced the fun.
Except, not if you’re on a workout.
If you’re on a workout then you can see the pumpkins and other road furniture, but you won’t see everyone riding along dressed as a part or whole dinosaur.
In order to keep with the theme of frightening oneself, I opted to put myself back through The Wringer.
Oooh. Spooky.
To be honest, this may well have been a bit … over ambitious, shall we say?
Things started off well enough, and for the first few intervals I was happily rocking out 120rpm, smashing my way through with a lovely 2m 40s recovery.
Though fairly quickly things went south.
Far from my usual high cadence efforts, pretty much all of the 100w recovery blocks were taken around 60-70rpm. I felt really rather tired from about block 4 onwards.
This is, I’m sure, in a large part to doing two fairly intense workouts back to back.
I don’t regret this. I mean, this was a conscious choice. But perhaps I should do one hard workout, one recovery ride, then repeat. This would have some impact on my weekly riding schedule, however, so it’s not quite as easy as this.
This is where you find the 4th pumpkin – the Head of the dino costume. 
During this ride I made two mistakes, that I was aware of, and one that I wasn’t.
The two mistakes were both in the “on” intervals.
Both times I ended up stood up, pushing at a very low cadence. This was, as best I recall, in the eighth and final blocks.
When you do this, ERG kicks in and becomes super intense. It’s almost impossible to turn the pedals over.
A far better approach is to keep a very high cadence, even if I end up dropping off. Dropping down from 100+ to 85rpm over 30 seconds is much easier to keep pedaling than dropping from 85 to 60, or lower.
This is what cost me a star in the final interval.
However, somehow I also managed to lose half a star in one of the recovery intervals. I’m guessing this is because I was pedaling so slowly that it didn’t cut it at 100w.
Or potentially, it punished me for spinning up too soon before the next interval.
Ahh well, whatever.
I was happy to unlock the full dino costume.
Yes, it’s silly and pointless, but I enjoyed it.
I was a little disappointed to only see 390 calories burned after this workout. For something that feels pretty intense, I guess there’s cumulatively a lot of downtime between the efforts.
The other thing that has frustrated me is I’ve given myself a little pain in my right calf.
This is definitely due to over exertion in the final few blocks. There’s no doubt about it, this is a difficult workout for me. It took a concerted effort to finish this, particularly as I needed a wee from about the 3rd interval onward. I knew that if I stopped, the effect of the workout wouldn’t be the same, so I persisted through.
I’m looking forwards to my rest day tomorrow. Well earned this week.
As it stands I’m at 82.9km ridden for the last three days. That’s my 100km riding goal effectively in the bag at this point.
Saturday is my next ride and will be an FTP Builder / recovery ride, most likely. I expect to do one of the 1.5 hour rides, so will comfortably cover the 100km goal and then some.
Sunday is still scheduled to be Alpe Du Zwift, all being well.
I’m considering doing the Sweet Spot Training and a workout comparable to this The Wringer every week from now on.
Whilst difficult, I certainly feel I have gained from these harder workouts over the last two weeks.
Hopefully my overall fitness improves as a result of this change up.
