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 (not counting the warm up before the TT), all bar one of which were deliberately at an easier tempo than a typical week.
I met both my weekly goals of:
- Riding 100km or greater
- Ride for 3 hours or greater
So that’s nice.
I was unsure if I’d make the 100km goal as late as Friday evening.
The reason for the easier tempo / lesser intensity of each ride this week was to take it easy ahead of the forthcoming week where I’m aiming to do the following:
- Proper FTP test
- Ride 100km+ in one ride (aka a century)
- Take on the SRAM: Send It Series (Race 4)
With the SRAM: Send It race scheduled for Tuesday / tomorrow morning at 10am, I am in a bit of a weird position regarding my other rides for the week.
My original intent was to do the FTP test tomorrow, having had Sunday and Monday off the bike. This would be as fresh as I would likely get, on any given “real world” week.
However, with a race in the way, I’m unlikely to be feeling very fresh after this on either Wednesday or Thursday, and don’t want to stay off the bike. So that kinda messes things up. I mean, I could always… not do the race? But then, it looks like it’s going to be a good one.
I’m also weighing up when, and where to do the century ride. Zwift has a few 100km+ routes, but all have substantial (1000m+ climbs) on the route. I’ve not yet decided if I’m going to opt for a single big circuit, or many smaller loops of say, Watopia Flat. I’m estimating 3 hours+ on a flat route, so with hills thrown in…
I’d quite like to do the century with a group. I prefer riding in a group on a longer ride. It’s more interesting with the chat aspect.
There is a Sunday 100km group ride each week, so potentially I might delay this till Sunday, and do the FTP test on Thursday.
Probably my favourite ride of this week was the Zwift Time Trials: Bologna race.
This was not only my first time trial (a new game mode on Zwift), but my first true race outside of any bigger scheduled event. Also, it was only my second time on Bologna course, the previous time being Giro d’Italia weekend.
Whilst I managed 33rd out of ~40ish riders, I am really pleased with my performance. Looking at the weighted average watts graph above, this was my strongest ever performance so really pleased with that.
Another great ride – for different reasons – this week was my first true group ride (again, outside the big organised events) riding The Herd’s Thundering Turtles Endurance Ride.
Whilst the intensity of this ride was a little lower than I would have preferred, the ride itself was well attended, the riders very friendly, and the overall experience was brilliant. Top work from all involved. And thank you again.
Other than that, this week was mainly short form workouts, and I felt each ride gave a decent “bang for my buck”.
Zwift Coders
Lastly for this weekly, outside of Zwift for riding / racing, I made progress on my Zwift Coding activities 🙂
I’ve figured out how to map my .fit files into a format I can then use to create leader boards. I talked about this last week.
Essentially I want to add my own lifetime leader boards to this site, so I can easily see – at a glance – how I’m progressing over time.
Zwift has the leader board facility, and it’s great. But it only lasts 30 days (rolling). That part sucks.
Strava, too, has leader boards. But they don’t seem to track all my times.
Being a coding nerd, I can DIY. And so I shall.
That’s my project for this week. There is one tricky part to it. And that’s taking laps – e.g. Volcano Circuits – and extracting out the repeats. If every ride was linear it would be much easier. Maybe I will start with the linear ones, e.g. climbing Box Hill or the Epic KOM, and then improve on things to include the repeats. That sounds like a good plan.
Not sure if I’m riding today. We shall see. The world, as they say, is currently my oyster. Freedooooom!