Each week Zwift sends me an email summarising my activity for the week. For previous weekly reviews click here.
This week consisted of 5 rides with 2 rest days. Generally the week felt strong, but there was no one stand out ride as best I recall. Certainly the average watts graph at the bottom of this post shows that to be the case.
I had aimed to put in a longer ride this week. Ideally a 50km ride on Sunday. That didn’t happen as I was just not feeling it. However, as I am about to have quite a bit more free time on my hands for a short while, I am hoping to get a 100km / century ride in during next week (not this week). That should be fun.
Each ride this week was a good length. That’s because I did no morning rides, which I definitely prefer.
Evening rides mean I am less constrained by time, but also feel less inclined to go hard as I’ve already done a full days work and so on.
I managed to get in one structured workout this week on Tuesday. Even though these rides are at a lower intensity than my usual free rides, I think throwing these into the mix is a good thing. Not every ride needs to be full on. I often forget this. Structured workouts, particularly easier ones, constrain me. Which sounds bad but is good.
The most peculiar thing for me this in this week’s stats would be the highest average watts going to the Volcano KOM ride, which definitely felt less performant than the attempt at Box Hill KOM. I guess I’m basing that ride entirely on the climb, whereas the rest of the ride was a bit laid back, shall we say.
All in all, I found this week to be a good one. I felt decent throughout, and whilst not pushing the numbers higher at the moment, I feel 196w as a guesstimated FTP is about accurate. I know I should do the proper FTP test. I keep meaning too. Maybe I should sign up for Trainer Road, which as best I understand, enforces a full on FTP test as the very first ride you do. That said, it looks really uninspiring – staring at a blue bar chart for an hour or so? No thanks.
To get through 200w with the guesstimated approach is going to take a seriously concerted effort. I don’t even think that’s the smartest way to go about it. I haven’t tried an FTP test yet, but I’m guessing there is no resistance variation throughout? It’s just push as hard as you can, and the scenery doesn’t count for anything. That’s where the guesstimated FTP thing falls down for me. Pushing up hill is fine, but the descent screws your average.
In unrelated other news, my explorations into custom leaderboards by extracting data from .fit files have come to a bit of a stumbling block.
The data itself is useful, but the latitude and longitude do not match up with the Strava segments. And I have not yet figured out a way to determine e.g. the start / finish line of the Volcano Circuit from the data I have. More thinking required. Be real nice if Zwift just sorted this out for me.