Each week Zwift sends me an email summarising my activity for the week. For previous weekly reviews click here.
This last week only consisted of four rides. Typically I would prefer to ride 5x a week, but for various real life reasons, last week was all over the shop.
Of the four rides, the two free rides were the more enjoyable. This would be the Innsbruck KOM ride on Monday, and two laps of Richmond on Friday.
All things being equal, aside from racing, I would say that climbing is probably the best workout that Zwift has to offer. The structured workouts are great, don’t get me wrong, but they set a somewhat false expectation of what real riding is like. This then comes back to kick me in a race.
With that said, however, I am still enjoying the FTP Builder workouts. I think it’s time to do another FTP test at this point, and the route I’m much more likely to take on this front is to do a Ramp Test.
What I would expect from the yellow zone portions of any workout would be to have me feeling close to my limit after several minutes of activity. As it was on Sunday, the four 5 minute efforts at 190w were tiring, but not to the point I felt like I was pushing myself significantly.
I’ve resigned to the fact that, at this point, any further gains are going to be gradual. Breaking through to an FTP of 200w or greater is, and has been my goal for a long while now. If I’m being honest, I would have hoped to have achieved this by now.
One thing that I have been pleased with lately has been my cadence work. Forcing myself to ride at 85+rpm is definitely yielding the feeling of improvement for me. I’d like to quantify this, and again, this leads towards a Ramp Test.
I’m questioning whether a bump in FTP at this point would mean I have to reset, or knock back several weeks on the FTP Builder workout. I mean, there’s no big problem if this is the case, I’m simply curious as to how a higher FTP would affect this given that the interval lengths are steadily increasing each week.
On a different note, I’m happy to have hit over 100km again this week. I had considered a 100km ride on Sunday, but for various real world reasons, that was an on again / off again scenario that ultimately became “off”.
I’d like to get a 100km ride under my belt. Why this hasn’t happened yet, and may not happen for some time is simply the length of time it takes to complete. I truly believe I am fit enough at this point to see it through, but putting aside ~3.5 hours “simply” for exercise is a really difficult ask for me currently.
Another thing that happened this week was the bug with RGT Cycling. This one was disappointing. In short, I wanted to ride RGT Cycling on Monday night but though everything seemed to work, once I was “in world” I hit upon a very weird bug that sent my Tacx Neo 2 virtual flywheel into over drive. The only solution here was to quit out and load Zwift instead. Along the way I think this has reset the Neo settings somehow, as the Richmond cobbles certainly felt vastly more noticeable this week than on any ride in recent memory.
As I write this at dinner time (lunch time for any posh-o’s) then I am hoping to ride RGT Cycling again this evening, so hopefully will have a better experience. I’ll try a different map today.
Lastly for this week I have to say that whilst I haven’t felt like any performance in particular has been weak, I certainly can’t say I’ve felt strong this week, or last. I’ve managed to pick up a slight twinge in the very top of my inner left thigh. It infrequently has started hurting when I’m walking. This is as a result of yesterday’s ride, though I’m not quite sure how it happened. If I had to guess it might have been when dismounting at the end of the ride? I can’t say I felt anything at the time.
Anyway, here’s to another week of riding!