OK, hands up, confession time.
Today was supposed to be my attempt at The Full Frontal.
However, I have a really good passable excuse as to why I wimped out and did something much, much easier instead.
It’s simple. I was following exactly what The Sufferfest told me to do!
So I actually did kit up, prep for the ride mentally (though being completely honest, I was very anxious all day), and then when I loaded the workout and started reading, it took me to the linked article above that suggests I follow a more structured approach.
I like this. It’s a lot more helpful to me than Zwift’s approach – hey, FTP test, do it! Bosh. Done.
So it’s looking like Sunday is “the big day”. I can deal with this. Partly because it’s not yet Sunday 🙂 and partly because it’s not a work day, where I have other stuff to deal with. And that’s why I didn’t get to ride yesterday – work finished late, then I went out for my first meal out since lockdown (3? 4? 10?) ended.
Anyway, today I did the suggested Cadence Builds workout. I’m out of sync with it a bit, but it felt like the right thing to do. Not too much, not too little.
This was my first video workout.
The aim of this ride was to do a series of high cadence ramp ups, starting at about 100rpm and quickly progress up to about 130rpm. This was repeated, I think, five times.
There was no emphasis on wattage figures, it was all about making a smooth transition from high cadence to max cadence.
I failed miserably.
Having the videos to cycle along to was a nice change, and one of the things I was looking forward to with The Sufferfest.
Technically things went off without a hitch – the video played back smoothly, without needing to pre-download the video. The quality of the video was decent, too. Fairly sure it was 1080p, rather than 4k, but that’s more than good enough for me.
When it came to do the high cadence bits, the video switched to a hamster in a wheel, which I thought was quite funny.
Outside of the little cadence bursts the workout itself was not at all strenuous. This was in line with what the 4DP text prep had said.
Interspersed between the blocks were plenty of shots of what I believe was a professional cycling race in Dubai. Decent footage, I enjoyed it.
One very odd thing was at the end of this workout, a video about kids in Africa came on.
Absolutely no idea why, or what it was trying to say.
There were two reasons I was at a loss:
- I couldn’t hear the video – at the start of the ride it said this ride has no music, please use your own. So I did, and so it overplayed with the video being set to no volume.
- The subtitles were provided but completely obscured by the user interface. What a total design fail!
Anyway, whatever that video was on about, I didn’t really see the relevance to a cycling app.
Due to the usual technical hiccups, my workout went at a higher wattage than the app was asking me to provide. I don’t really know how to solve this problem. Hopefully the 4DP test resolves this issue (?)
After the workout you do get a nice screen displaying how things went – it’s not possible to zoom in though, at least not as far as I can see. I’m not sure why I had a drop out in RPM either…
After this one, because it was only 30 minutes or so, and because it was a very nice night, and that I’d been in at my desk all day, I decided to do an outdoor session, too.
I did a deliberately super light ride – keeping in line with the prep for the 4DP session.
This was partly to add some kilometres to the weekly riding goal, and in part to give those lovely little greenflies some food – my arms and legs, they do love to nibble.
Keeping at a ridiculously low wattage was a real challenge, but I did my best 🙂
I’ll look to do either a recovery spin tomorrow, using their workouts, or maybe some of the yoga… or something… I’ll do something, and keep following their plan.
