A short and sweet sweaty one today, with another bout of Emily’s Short Mix. This is by far and away my “favourite” workout when time is short, and I want to put in a good effort.
And time was short today as it took me over an hour to get home. I think the sat nav was having a laugh at my expense. The magical mystery tour of Preston and surrounding areas. With low petrol. And therefore no air-con. The sweating began long before I hit the bike this afternoon.
With the extra long bank holiday traffic jam out of the way, I was short on time today. Too short to hit the Zwift Academy workout I might have otherwise done by any measure.
I tried to keep my cadence down, particularly for the first block. And by down I mean below 100rpm. This has been a bit of a failing of mine on these shorter workouts.
The hardest part of this workout comes after the second block.
The first set of intervals are fairly short, with a 1.5 minute recovery before the next block. This is short, which means recovering in a green block – or at 170w for me.
This short recovery is a bit of a killer after the first block, but even more so after the second block.
This is because the blocks get longer each time, but the recovery is consistently short.
To mitigate this, somewhat, I kept my cadence much lower at the start of the third block. Even so, it crept back up towards the end of that block.
3 minutes at 200w, immediately followed by 3 minutes at 230w is gruelling for me. A real bar gripper by the end of that final interval.
But a good workout, no denying it.
Not as fast as you’d think.
All in all, I’m happy to have put in something for the day.
I’m a long way off my 100km riding goal this week. That’s fair enough.
I’ll also likely do the weekly review later next week. Can’t help that.
I’m still aiming to ride some more this week, but it won’t be on Zwift.
Also I won’t have my heart rate monitor – so any 190+bpm efforts and I’ll have to rely on that funny feeling I get in my face – you know the one, like I’m about to die? Ahh yes. That one.
The most interesting part of this workout is that it’s fairly close to FTP over 20 minutes. That’s something I’ve not seen in most other workouts.
It’s the workout I love to hate. But only whilst I’m doing that final block 🙂
