Each week Zwift sends me an email summarising my activity for the week. For previous weekly reviews click here.
It’s been an interesting and enjoyable week on the bike this week.
With Zwift’s new Yorkshire course to explore, and a Zwift Academy race to ride, I’ve not felt short of things to keep me occupied, both mentally and physically.
The Yorkshire course is great. I’ve only ridden the reverse circuit so far, but I really enjoyed it. The UK countryside feel has been fully nailed. Great job.
And whilst short, the 1 lap of Watopia Hilly race was a great way to finish up the “optional” aspect of Zwift Academy 2019. I’ve done two group rides, and two races. As ever, the racing gives me the best memories and experiences. It’s a feeling of everything I do whilst training (for want of a better word) comes in to play. I really enjoy them.
In terms of goals this week I managed to ride for over 3 hours, and ride over 100km. This meets both of my weekly riding goals, but really… only just.
I’m not being overly harsh on myself on only riding four times this week instead of my typically expected five. The tops of my thighs have been really feeling tense over the last four or five days, so having completed my goals for the week, I decided Sunday would be a rest day. It did feel a bit strange having not ridden on a Sunday, but there we go.
My plans to take an easier ride on Friday in preparation for the race on Saturday really seemed to pay off. I think the ~7km pre-race warm up also helped massively in loosening up the legs.
In the race I managed my best ever Zwift performance according to the average wattage graph.
I forget exactly what the figures represent now, but the top dot shows 203w as my weighted average watts, and 187.3w as my average watts.
The most important thing for me is that the graph continues to trend of higher highs, and higher lows. This represents steady progress, and is much easier to quantify visually than going purely off feelings.
It’s interesting to me in the way that how I feel on the bike today is not dissimilar to how it felt on my first times on Zwift. The power output is different, but the feeling of effort and exertion remains the same. I think I once saw a pro say this:
it never gets easier, you just get faster.
a cycling pro who I don’t know the name of
All in all, another decent week in the bag.
I did get an email from Zwift regarding the academy:
Unless something completely untoward happens, I expect to have plenty of time to finish my last two workouts. As I write this on Sunday, tomorrow is my planned day to ride workout #7 – VO2 max. It will likely be a beast, but it can’t be harder than the FTP test. That gives me some solace.
Given that after a ZA workout my legs are usually fairly hammered, I expect to take an easier ride on Tuesday evening, and then – ideally – look to finish the academy either Thursday or Friday this week. If not, I still have the weekend and all next week to see me through. It all depends on how the legs feel. I imagine the last workout is the hardest of them all, but I have no proof of this.