Indoor Cycling – (Two) Weekly Review August 19th – September 1st 2019

Each week Zwift sends me an email summarising my activity for the week. For previous weekly reviews click here.

This week’s review is a little different as I was away during the past week so I’m condensing two weekly reviews into one.

Overall I didn’t meet my weekly riding distance goal of 100km, nor my time goal of 3 hours during this week.

This was largely because I usually make up the difference on Saturday / Sunday, but this week that was time spent in the airport / on a plane / on the beach 🙂

I’ll live with this.

Again, during the second week my only riding day (on Zwift) was on Sunday. This was all about simply getting back onto the saddle as quickly as possible, to re-kick start my habit.

I put in a short effort, but it was at pace.

Overall these two weeks look on the light side.

There was, however, two rides whilst away on the Spanish gym bike.

I have no idea how intense these rides were. They were definitely sweaty. Actually they were the first true longer rides I’ve done in a gym. I quite liked the handlebar setup on that bike. It was significantly different to the road bike, and somewhat more comfortable in some ways.

Not having access to Zwift was a bore, however.

I honestly think that I’d have given up on riding very quickly if all I had to stare at was a few LEDs bobbing up and down. Also everything was in Spanish so I have no idea whether I was riding at or near to FTP, or just suffering along with some arbitrary numbering system.

No bueno.

Most interesting to me from the graph above was in that yesterday’s free ride, though only 20 minutes of hard riding, was my third best performance in terms of wattage on Zwift so far. Happy about that.

In some ways I miss doing the free rides. That’s how I started with Zwift, many months ago now.

I’m thinking after I finish up the Zwift Academy 2019, I will likely switch back to a week of free rides before resuming the FTP Builder series. Maybe after the Zwift Academy, and before resuming the FTP Builder I will hit the ramp test, as has been mentioned a few times now.

Mostly I did damage to my body whilst away. This was due to over eating, and over drinking. I don’t regret this, as such. It was, after all, my first true holiday in 3 years. But I have definitely regained my podgy belly fat. That needs to go. Hence the immediate resumption of bike based activities.

Overall I’m happy with the last two weeks in terms of exercise. It went about as well as I could have expected. I missed an expected workout whilst away but I’m not going to dwell on it.

Onwards!

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