For today’s ride I um’ed and ahh’ed for a little too long when choosing what to ride, meaning I only ended up with about 50 minutes to spare.
I was debating between one of the FTP Builder rides, one of the Zwift Academy rides, or something completely off plan. The FTP Builder rides were all 1+ hours, which I didn’t have, and the Zwift Academy workout looked intense enough that the tops of my thighs were not happy at the prospect.
Riding ~70km earlier in the week really took it’s toll on my legs, it would seem. It felt good earlier in the week, but on Thursday the rest day was more than welcome. And then yesterday – Friday – I had intended to get into a Zwift Academy 2019 race, but in hindsight, that would likely have been a bad move.
As above, the tightness in my thighs is highlighting that a little less intensity might not be such a bad thing.
In the end I opted for something I have never done before on Zwift: a free ride.
Now this isn’t the same as my usual free rides, even though the name is the same. This would be a training plan free ride, meaning you can ride at whatever intensity you like, over any terrain you like, and you don’t feel the terrain, essentially.
What I wanted to do was ride for ~30 minutes at or around 170w.
That didn’t quite work as planned.
Instead what I ended up doing was riding as close as I could to 90rpm, and varied up the gearing – simply to see what would happen.
I learned a bunch of things on this ride.
In short I ended up doing:
- about 3 minutes of warmup around 100w
- 5 minutes at ~140w @ ~90rpm
- 10 minutes at ~190w @ ~90rpm
- 4 minutes at ~100w @ ~90rpm
- 5 minutes at ~160w @ ~90rpm
- 5 minutes at ~190w @ ~90rpm
- ~10 minutes at 150w @ ~80rpm
I think that breakdown is largely correct.
In the end my plans to ride at a fixed wattage went out of the window fairly quickly. In order to hit bang on 170w I would have needed to ride at a lower cadence, and I wanted to spin faster.
In truth the workout felt good, and the 10 minute @ FTP was hard work. I put in another 5 minutes at FTP which felt like it made for a good workout overall.
The last block was probably the most taxing. I struggled to keep up the 90+rpm spinning for that one, but don’t feel too hard on myself for staying around 80rpm.
Happy to have met my 100km riding goal for the week with a day to spare.
I’m aiming to do a Zwift Academy 2019 social spin tomorrow morning at 10am. That will likely put another 30-40km on the week’s total.
All in all, I enjoyed this free ride. It was something new. The time went quickly. Sticking to a set cadence was a nice challenge, and without hills and dips to worry about it was easy to get into a steady rhythm.
I’d be up for doing this again.
For the cool down I simply took the last 3 minutes and with each minute dropped a gear whilst retaining the same cadence – approx 85rpm.
Getting through ~430 calories in 45 minutes tells me I put in a decent shift on this ride.
That said, I did feel like I worked hard, particularly in the FTP intervals.
I’m really pleased with how smooth the cadence graph is for this ride. Probably my smoothest performance. Of course this is helped by no hills / dips, but still, it felt like I was largely under control.
Practice is paying off.
The one negative for me on this ride is around lack of control. I jumped to 10 minutes at FTP with barely any warmup, and that was not intentional. I had intended to go at 170w, but couldn’t control myself sufficiently.
There’s always something that can be improved.
Just a nice and steady ride in summary.
I am really feeling it in the thighs now. Hopefully tomorrow’s ride won’t be at too great an intensity.
