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. Three (well, maybe two and a half) were harder workouts. One was a recovery ride. And the last ride of the week was a hard climb.
As the previous week had been on the lighter side (I skipped the Sunday climb), I started this past week with a harder workout, rather than the usual active recovery ride.
I’ve had the Sweet Spot Training ride in my weekly schedule now for the last few weeks, and I’m thinking I need to bump up the intensity by 5% for my next session.
In the same vein, I figured I’d push myself with another hard workout on Wednesday, opting for the Dig Deep Coaching – Stage 12 session. The aim of this ride was to replicate Laurens ten Dam’s approach to climbing l’Alpe d’Huez. Essentially this ride started above FTP for 10 minutes, then at FTP for 10 mins, then just below FTP for 10 mins, and finally at about 80% FTP for the last 11 mins. What was most challenging for me about this ride was to stay at 78rpm for each block. I definitely find spinning slower during a workout to be far more challenging than spinning fast.
Given that I’d had two harder workouts on Tuesday and Wednesday night, on Thursday I opted for one of the active recovery / blue zone rides from Zwift’s FTP Builder program. This went fine, although as ever I found the ride to be really dull.
I’d have really liked to have taken part in the Thanks Giving ride, which as I saw had over 1600 active riders. However, as it set off at 3pm (GMT) on Thursday, it was not to be.
Moving into the weekend I was feeling somewhat cautious about taking on the climb.
I felt similarly last week and let that become a big part of the reason I, ahem, wimped out.
On Saturday I didn’t get much time to ride, so had to make do with a short workout, opting for Emily’s Short Mix. It’s been a while since I’ve done that workout, and it was surprising how quickly we were over and done with. 30 minutes is no longer enough, which is a really interesting thing to note given that when I first started with Zwift I found 20 minutes challenging.
Taking on an enforced shorter ride on Saturday meant I was fairly fresh for Sunday.
There was a risk of a sore knee, but that seemed to go away over night.
The Calm Before The Climb
I did wake with a continued sore throat, however. And as I sit writing this on Monday dinner time, I’ve still very much got this illness in full, snotty flow.
Perhaps tackling an intense workout / climb on Sunday with an illness wasn’t the smartest idea. This became fairly immediately apparently as I hit the bottom of the Col de Glieres climb and needed constants of sips of water as I coughed and spluttered my way up the road.
An issue I’ve faced over the last few weeks is pre-ride nerves going into these climbs. The thought of constantly having to beat my previous best efforts can be a little daunting. Does every ride need to be stronger than the last? Can it be?
It’s easy to psych myself out, meaning I don’t even want to get on to the bike.
That said, once I’ve actually got in to the ride and started the climb, I am committed to seeing it through, no matter how much I want to stop. My theory has always been to keep the pedals turning and inevitably, at some point in the future I will reach the top.
Overall I feel I could have done better on this week’s climb. Certainly I shouldn’t have “given up” once I made it to the top, rather, I should have kept pushing until the very end of the route.
I’m a little disappointed that the result of my climb wasn’t a new all time high. As above, I am aware this isn’t going to always be the case. I’m not feeling 100% so I’m guessing I wasn’t in the best position to beat previous records.
In terms of work out benefit, I still strongly believe in this current routine, though in a moment will cover why this may change a touch over the next 30 days or so.
On a semi-related note I’m happy that I was able to video the climb this week, without the resulting output being in a bizarre pink tint. It’s still not brilliant, given that this solution so far has cost me £110, but I’m in a better place than I was.
I’m wondering at this stage if I need a second PC – a dedicated streaming PC – in order to capture the footage. What I might try is streaming the footage to YouTube, or similar, rather than recording it directly to disk. Maybe the process of recording video is more intensive than streaming. I really have no idea.
I’m looking forward to exploring the Tacx Video rides in more depth over the next few weeks. I’m still waiting on Tacx Support to get back to me regarding the 30 day premium code failure.
What this may mean is that I do not hit my weekly Zwift 100km riding goal over the next few weeks. In that case I’ll be switching to Strava / Training Peaks and using the metrics captured there, instead.
This also may mean that my current weekly set of workouts goes off the rails for a while. I’m not quite sure how the workout functionality of Tacx Software works just yet. I know they have this feature, but it looks quite daunting to set up.
So that’s about it for me. A jumble of thoughts covering the last week.
Here’s to another week on the bike!