Each week Zwift sends me an email summarising my activity for the week. For previous weekly reviews click here.
This week’s riding consisted of 5 sessions, across which I had a real mixture of intensities and activities. It’s been a fun week, but also a fairly tiring one.
I decided to start the week with a 2x 15 minute FTP session workout. As I’ve said several times now over the last few months, I’m convinced my FTP is greater than 195w, though not by a huge amount. This was somewhat proven by how I felt at the end of this session – tired, but not exhausted.
Having started the week with Tuesday’s FTP intervals, I perhaps should have taken Wednesday’s ride as an Active Recovery session. Instead, I went in for my usual Sweet Spot Training routine, and certainly felt it in my legs towards the end. I’m still finding a huge amount of benefit in these weekly SST sessions and expect to continue hitting this workout at least once per week for the foreseeable future.
With two high intensity workouts in the bag, on Thursday night I was planning on doing an easier ride – the typical blue zone FTP Builder ride, or Active Recovery. However, I decided to activate my 30 day Premium Tacx Software subscription code and hit the flats of Amsterdam City Ride instead.
I really enjoyed the Amsterdam ride, and am looking forwards to doing more of the Tacx Software video rides over the next few weeks. Being largely flat, I had expected to do a similar ride to what I would have done in the Zwift FTP Builder workout – roughly an hour at 140w. However, with the help of the on-screen ETA, I quickly realised that at 140w I’d be on the bike for about 1.5 hours, and I didn’t have that kind of time to spare on a weeknight. As such, Thursday’s ride was taken at closer to 160w which probably was a little too intense given the previous two rides.
However, I did feel a sense of satisfaction having seen the ride through, as I’d tried and failed to finish the Amsterdam City Ride twice before. I still had technical issues on this occasion, but managed to wangle my way through.
Given that I’d put in three higher intensity sessions mid-week, I decided to give myself a light ride on Saturday. My theory here was that typically I would do an endurance ride on Saturday and maybe, just maybe, this would have some detrimental impact on Sunday’s climb. This ride went absolutely fine, if a little dull, as these long easy rides usually are for me.
Going in to Sunday with effectively two rest days and a bunch of time to do what I like, I opted for another Tacx video ride: Cormet de Roselend – Col du Pré. This was a fairly intensive climb at 15km total ride length, 12.2km of which was the climb itself. The climb was at an average gradient of 8%, with a max gradient of 13.3%.
I made two mistakes on this ride:
The first was to download the ride video ahead of time. This is something specific to the way I blog my rides. Tacx Software has some DRM facility which has made it incredibly challenging (and expensive) to capture footage from the rides that I need to make nice blog posts. To clarify, Tacx Software allows you to either download the ride video in advance (at 720p, or 1080p), or you can stream the video as you ride. If downloading the 720p / 1080p video, my computer seems to struggle to record the actual ride video. No such issue with streaming. And of course, I forgot this and then downloaded the video and lost half the recording due to encoding issues.
Technical issues aside, the second mistake I made was to do a 20 minute FTP road test out of the gate.
I have no regrets at attempting this, but it completely screwed up the ride in totality.
As I’ve said a few times now (even in this post), I strongly believe my FTP is greater than the 195w figure I gained during my first (and only) true Zwift FTP test. However I’ve not had the time (or, truthfully, the desire) to repeat the test recently.
I’ve had the goal of finishing 2019 at an FTP of 200w or greater. This means I need to hold ~211w for 20 minutes. My goal for this ride was to hold 220w for 20 minutes right from the start line.
In order to give myself the best possible chance of this, and knowing the ride was essentially all up hill from the off, I did a 10km easy warm up on Zwift before hand, just to get the legs ready. Then I was off.
I’m really pleased to report back that my 20 minute interval came in at somewhere between 215w and 218w. I can’t be absolutely sure as the on-screen metrics made it hard to definitively ascertain my performance. But I was in between those figures and that puts me at an FTP of between 204 and 206w. As long as I can repeat this during the next true FTP test (over Xmas) then I will have beaten my goal and have had a brilliant first year on the bike.
However, in doing this 20 minute intense block, I completely blew up the rest of the ride.
Coming off the 20 minute high intensity block, I then had to recover on a climb. What the hell was I thinking?
For the next 50 minutes or so I really struggled. So much so that I ended the ride at an overall average of, as best I recall, 199w.
There’s a lot of validity to this metric, as discussed in the ride write up itself. But essentially, I feel there always will be disparity between a 20 minute FTP test ‘score’, and what is really achievable riding for a full hour. As mentioned in that post, it took me a long while after hitting 195w over 20 minutes to actually being able to ride for an hour at 195w average. Such will likely be the case the next, and every other time my FTP increases.
The one disappointment from this week is that the ride graph for the climb didn’t really reflect the amount of work those first 20 minutes contained. I mean… it does contain the cold hard truth, but it feels a little frustrating that the hard stint was swallowed up by the overall performance, if that makes sense.
With Christmas approaching, and with the results from this road test, I’m a significantly less hesitant now to take my next FTP test. I can’t say I’m looking forward too it, but I have a target to aim for and more importantly, a belief I am capable of 205w or even greater.
I’m also really looking forwards to exploring the Tacx Software some more. I am really enjoying the video rides – more so than I expected. Zwift’s strong point is the racing / group ride aspect, and I do like the structured workouts. But the visuals on Tacx are so much better for me, personally.
I think that’s just about everything from me this week. Here’s to another week on the bike!