Today was a bit of a muddle. I wanted to get on the bike at 4pm right after work. But work overran, and then I was politely reminded that I had agreed to help my wife with a light touch of furniture removal.
So, much later than planned, I finally got back home, kitted up, and ready to do some cycling. Outdoors was out of the question as it was raining, so my options were some kind of turbo session.
Initially I planned to do some RGT Cycling – a trip to Cap Formentor sounded ideal. However, I couldn’t remember my password and the app moaned about my funky email address. I’ve email support, so hopefully I’ll be back in sometime soon.
By this point I was super frustrated – late on, felt like I’d lost all my time, and just wanted to get cycling.
So, Zwift is the easiest option, so that’s what I did.
I was going to do an FTP Builder workout, but I spotted the L’Etape du Tour Training Club rides whilst hunting around the training menu, and the one that I picked looked quite similar to the FTP Builder program, but a little more interesting.
L’Etape du Tour will require a largely aerobic effort from you. With 135km and 4563m in elevation gain, the more efficient you are in your fuel source, the more energy you will have for the final climb to the finish.
Aerobic Endurance workouts are aimed at improving your efficiency at lower intensity levels. Training your muscles to access fat as its main fuel source and preserve your precious glycogen stores for the finale.
After warming up, you will be completing 3 x 12min aerobic efforts with 3min recovery.
Ride overview from Whats On Zwift
The schedule for today looked as follows:
There’s a lot of yellow here, but mostly it was actually blue.
However, it was high blues. Bluey-green would be more accurate.
Mostly I found the early stages to be straight forward, but once I got in to the 3 repeats I was feeling a bit tender in the right knee. That seems to come and go. Today was a bit uncomfortable. I guess the best way to describe it is it feels like a knuckle that needs to be cracked, but I can’t seem to crack it.
What I was really after today was driving down the kilometer totals for the week.
With Tuesday being a bit of a strange day, I only managed to get 15km in then. Yesterday was outdoors, which was great, but outdoor kilometers are much harder won than the indoor ones.
I was at ~45km on the week prior to this ride. Quite some way off my 100km total.
It was interesting that both the on-screen text for this workout, and my Garmin both reported that really this one was fairly laid back. I think the Garmin suggested 5 hours for recovery.
I found it a bit harder on the legs than either seemed to think it should be.
Particularly by the third block of the second and third sets I was tired and grateful for the recovery.
I’m mostly looking forward to a rest day tomorrow.
This is in large part because – all being well – my new computer bits should finally be here, and so I can build the new PC and get back to Zwifting / indoor training with music on.
I’m fortunate to have the laptop which has been a bit of a saviour during this down time, but trying to Zwift on it is a bit arduous. It’s hard to see the screen, it sounds tinny, and generally it’s just not as good as on the big rig.
That said, PC parts or no, if it’s a nice day tomorrow I might just head on outdoors for an hour.
Looking at the forecast, it may make more sense to do this at dinner time. I guess if I can bring myself to do it, I will do. Beats spending 8 hours at the desk.
So in truth, the big win today is getting an hour and ten on the bike, knocking another 40km off the total, but crunching through another 600+ calories is the biggy.
Last weekend was a bit of a fail, what with all the mechanical issues, so I feel “down” overall on where I should be.
Things feel like they are ticking back upwards again as we come to the end of this week.
Actually, scratch that.
Maybe the biggest win today was that I managed a full session where the Wahoo Tickr behaved as expected.
What an absolute result.
