Each week Zwift sends me an email summarising my activity for the week. For previous weekly reviews click here.
This week has been primarily about finishing off the Zwift Academy 2019. I’ve enjoyed the Zwift Academy 2019 process overall, and would definitely want to get involved again – should they run it again – in 2020.
Of all the activities involved, I would place the two races as the most rewarding aspect. Racing, for me, is the culmination of all other parts of cycling. The long training rides, the short, punchy efforts, the gruelling climbs, the mental battle… it’s all there in a race.
The two group rides were fun. I’d have liked to get more involved in the group workouts, as suffering with 100’s of others is vastly more motivating than riding solo. That said, the available times to hit the group workouts just didn’t click for me. The preferable slot would have been the 4:10pm start, but that’s about 5 minutes before I’m getting in from work, so that was a no go. An hour later and I wouldn’t be finished until well into tea time, so that would never do.
Some of the workouts were harder than others. Workout #7 was particularly difficult, and workout #2 was memorably painful. The last workout, #8 – 4 minute power duration – was one of the easiest. As I said in the write up, maybe this was intentional – so when you think back before signing up next year, you don’t remember it being that bad.
All that said, the premise of the Zwift Academy (for people like me, too old to go pro, and not fit enough by any means) was simply to improve my fitness. And I truly believe it did.
Also this week I got in a free ride on Zwift’s new Yorkshire / Harrogate circuit. I saw a bit of the in-real-life racing on the TV on Sunday, and it was cool to see how Zwift’s equivalent fares up. There’s no comparison really when it comes to the visuals, but for the atmosphere and feeling I think Zwift have nailed it.
Earlier in the week I took on a repeat of the week’s FTP Builder ride. I needed something light and easy, and for clocking up a bit of time on the bike without killing myself, the ‘blue’ rides in the FTP Builder program are great.
With my desire to complete the FTP Builder program and work through each of the exercises, I have found the length of time that some of the rides entail to be challenging to fit into a weeknight ride. I’m not overly strict on myself on when I complete these rides.
I’m certainly not following the order exactly. With that in mind, I hit on a 1.5 hour ride this week, so that fit in nicely as my Sunday morning ride. Picking a flat circuit for these workouts is one way to burn through the kilometer riding goal, and this week I’m happy to say I smashed it with a total of 166km. My biggest ride being over 50km, which I haven’t done in a long while.
From the average watts graph the interesting thing for me is the most recent low. This comes from the Tuesday night ride, the one immediately after workout #7 on the ZA2019 program. That workout was intense. The night after I wanted the easiest ride possible. The interesting thing being that it’s wasn’t the lowest intensity ride I’ve had in the last 3 months.
Generally I’m happy with the graph direction. The trend is still up and to the right, which is always good.
Over the next few weeks I want to try out some new things.
I’m looking at RGT Cycling, and also taking up my free trial from the Tacx video ride software. It’s not that I’m bored of Zwift, but rather I’m ready to see what else is out there. I’m not quite sure how easy it will be to share screenshots from these rides, so this will be the challenge I face.
I’m also aware that I need to update both my ride stats on this site, and also add in the new KOM’s and leaderboards to my various pages. The truth is, I have simply forgotten how to update these. I wrote some code to do it, didn’t document how it works, and now have no idea how I made it work previously. Typical.