With the UK undergoing something of a (likely global warming inspired) heatwave this week, I thought I’d raise my internal temperature to match with a pre-tea jolly up the Volcano.
Opting for the Whole Lotta Lava circuit, which is a new route to me. It’s billed as alternate laps of the Volcano Circuit and trips up and down the Volcano KOM.
I keep banging on about it, but graphically, Zwift is looking much nicer since bumping up to 1080p on the Macbook Pro. I have noticed zero drop in performance. And better still, this eBay auction I won for a proper gaming PC may yet one day actually arrive at my house and I can ramp up the visuals to 1080p on Ultra settings. How exciting.
If anything I felt like I set off at something of an unrealistic pace today. With very little warm up, I seemed to jump from ~120w to ~180w, and was regularly above 200w for a good chunk of the ride.
I put this down to the Whey Powder I’ve been drinking after each ride. It sounds a bit far fetched but I’ve definitely felt stronger after starting to drink this whilst showering post-ride.
Oh yeah, Giro cool.
There was something that I found frustrating on this ride.
The Whole Lotta Lava course doesn’t let you complete a full circuit of the Volcano before sending you up the KOM. I find some of Zwift’s level design decisions to be a tad unintuitive.
So here we go, turning off the counter clockwise Volcano circuit and onto the Volcano KOM.
I’ll be honest, some of these glamour shots I take are purely to distract myself from the effort I’m putting in to the ride.
Ever since starting to Zwift on the TV rather than my iPad, whenever I’ve seen the Epic KOM off in the distance I’ve felt a great sense of accomplishment knowing I’ve been up there. It’s truly epic.
This was the first indication of my Volcano KOM ETA, and I was pleased to see it under the previous attempt. However last time I climbed the Volcano I was on a 50km ride, so perhaps a tad unfair to judge.
This innocuous looking screeny was a big deal to me. Here I am, 20 minutes in and 9.2km into the ride, including 130m of climb. It was ~8 weeks ago I was struggling to make 10km on flats in 20 minutes, so this is huge progress and I’m really glad I’ve kept such detailed track of it.
If I recall, at this point I had dropped to the lower ring at the front but was pedaling fairly frantically to get to the top under 11 minutes.
Yep, 111rpm, legs going like the clappers, not a great deal of speed but very pleased to be over the line and back on some flat and level ground.
Again, not going to speak too much about the difference in time. Maybe I will attempt the 50km Out And Back Again circuit sometime soon and see how I fare on that attempt as a better comparison.
With tea nearly ready, I set a sight of 15km with a kilometer or two of cool down before I’d have to jump off the bike and get showered.
The best thing about this ride? The 199w 20 minute average. Really pleased with this. Pushing for 200w now as an FTP marker.
Looks like spaghetti. Getting 332kcal of exercise in 35 minutes, I’m happy with that.
It’s interesting how my legs feel when on these rides. The first 10km hurt the most. After this, a kind of momentum kicks in, and the next 10km feels easier. I’ve noticed this on longer rides especially. It can feel a little frustrating having to get off when my legs want to keep going.
Again, happy to have kept a high (for me) level of power for a longer duration, rather than trying to sprint or whatever on this occasion.
Another 180m towards the virtual Everesting goal.
I felt like I rode well today, and that often doesn’t translate into any FTP jumps from Zwift. So was pleasantly surprised to grab a guesstimated FTP boost.
Usually this happens when I feel I’ve not ridden that hard, or found the ride more challenging than usual. I guess today I just felt pretty good.
Not sure whether to ride tomorrow. Done 5 days in a row. Maybe a rest day would be nice.