Looking for a new workout series to keep me going, I have done my usual thing of opting for the path of least resistance. With my eye on the Poison Dartfrog workouts, the stumbling block there was I would have to download them in advance, then import them into Zwift … all that takes time, and after work I just want to fire up the PC, get into my kit, and get riding.
Tonight was going to be a Sweet Spot Session, but I just so happened to scroll right to the end of the list of workouts and chanced a click on The Norseman series of workouts.
There are six, all with suitably Viking sounding names, today’s one being Dyranut, which most definitely isn’t supposed to be pronounced Dry Nut, but that’s what I went with in my head.
The most appealing thing about these workouts is they are all between one hour and 1h 15m in duration. Perfect for me.
Also, looking at the TSS scores for each ride, they are about what I’d expect from an SST session, if it continued just a bit longer. So, all in all, they seem like a good fit.
Heck, there’s only six of them, and I’ve now completed one, so worse case they are all horrendous and I regret picking the series. But hopefully not, right ?
This workout was a bit of a variation on a theme. It reminded me of this one I did a few weeks back.
What I like about these short off / on repeat type workouts is the constant variation really makes the time go by.
Perhaps because I’d come off the back of yesterday being a rest day, but I didn’t find this one too bad really. It suggested during the warm up that I might wish to toggle the difficulty up or down, depending on how I was getting on. I never felt the need to up it, but equally it wasn’t one I needed to turn down. Just right, I guess.
Suiting me, it started hard and then got progressively easier…
Wait, no, that’s misleading.
What I like is when the workouts are front loaded. Got a hard effort to do? Put it at the start. Don’t have that looming over me for the duration of the workout – it’s as mentally draining as it is physical.
In this one, each block of 8 efforts started with 3 harder efforts, then 2, then finally the last block started with just one at 130% FTP, dropping the rest down to 120% FTP.
That’s not to say that final block was easy, but I was grateful it wasn’t done in reverse.
One tricky thing I find on ERG mode with these types of workouts is the drop off can be a bit brutal on the knees.
Swapping from 280w back to 140w suddenly becomes dramatically less resistant, and it’s very easy to find myself spinning at >100rpm. Damage can be done there.
Some of my spin ups and downs were, as a result, a little erratic. Oh well, it is what it is.
The one thing that really helped me during this one was always trying to reset my heart rate back to 140bpm, or less, after each effort. Focusing on that, and keeping to 95rpm in the on-blocks, and being less strict on myself (for once) in the off blocks really helped during this ride.
So overall I don’t want to say I enjoyed this one, because it was hard work. But it was a good workout, and I liked the variation.
The next one comes in at 10 minutes longer and looks more intense. However it looks fairly SST-esque, so it should, hopefully, be in my comfort zone, for want of a better phrase.
All in though, a good start to the week. Tomorrow should be a bit less intensive, and then depending on how I feel, I may choose to tackle Workout #2 on Thursday.
