After my second ever 50+km ride on Sunday just gone I needed to rest my legs on Monday. And on Tuesday morning, I still wasn’t feeling up to a ride. I spent some time doing a little research into the difficulty of Zwift’s climbs whilst giving some thought to what challenge to tackle next.
Later in the evening (yesterday evening, at this point) I felt up to a “quick” spin on the bike. I figured I could handle a blue / green ride, and ideally around 30 minutes. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a suitable workout in these zones, and didn’t think to create my own. Instead, I opted for a free ride on London’s Classique route.
I didn’t want to put excess pressure on my legs during this ride. Instead, I opted to spend the majority of the ride at a high cadence, with low resistance. I’ve done this before, and it certainly gets the sweat pouring.
There’s a short blip of a climb on the Classique, which as shown in the screenshot above, very briefly goes up to 5%. On the first lap I always smash my way up, and noticeably drop off on each subsequent lap 🙂 I had no idea that this is supposed to be Parliament Street (as best I can tell), which is where Downing Street is in real life. I’d love to see this on better graphics settings.
I hadn’t set out to ride any specific goals, but spotting I was at the ten minute mark and at 4.7km, I felt like I should push harder for the next 10 minutes and try to get to 10km in under 20 minutes. The challenge today being that I would do this at a much higher cadence than usual (90+ rpm).
It would be pretty cool if I could activate ERG mode mid-freeride on Zwift. This would really help with keeping a steady cadence / wattage regardless of the terrain. Maybe, in order to do this, I need to do a ‘choose you own’ workout. Maybe that’s the only way?
I managed to reach my personal target of 10km under 20 minutes, though being completely honest, it was touch and go for a while. Spinning fast is quite knackering. That’s one thing. But when it gets to down hill segments, it’s really hard to put out any power with little resistance. My stubbornness in refusing to change gears didn’t help.
I passed the London Mall Sprint three times on my ride. On the first two times I had no intention of sprinting. Perhaps I shouldn’t have sprinted at all. But I couldn’t help myself on the third time around.
My time was far from world beating. I gave it my best effort, but it wasn’t able to beat my previous personal best.
Behind the scenes I’ve been working on integrating with Strava’s Developer API to track my sprints and KOM times on a more permanent basis. This is a way off being released publicly, but the fact that Zwift only show 30 days worth of PR’s is a bit meh in my opinion.
The ride summary from Zwift tells me that I really didn’t follow my blue / green plan at all. It was more of a green / yellow ride. Not a bad thing, but I’m really bad at following my initials plans when riding on free rides. A structured work out would almost certainly have been a better choice.
After this ride I felt pain in my right hand side, towards my lower back, but definitely on the right. And on my right shin. No idea what this means, nor how I have done it. Silly though.
Happy to have got some kilometers logged for the week. Each week I set myself a goal of riding 100km or more, so I’m 1/5th (more of less) of the way into that for this week now.
The cadence figures are where I’m happiest with this ride. Working on keeping a high cadence may help with climbing, from what I’ve seen on YouTube. Who knows though, in reality once I hit a proper gradient, spinning fast is a nice idea but it’s hard as hell.