Two birds with one stone today.
I managed to get in my third Norseman workout, a great way to kick start the week, whilst also experiencing the latest Zwift map expansion in the form of the neon light fest of Neokyo.
It’s a shame really, the pictures above don’t do the route the justice it deserves. It is by far and away the most visually interesting Zwift route yet. However the pictures I had that didn’t have UI on them spoiling it all are few and far between, so the pictures in the slideshow above look a bit underwhelming.
Coming into this one with a rest day yesterday and a recovery ride on Sunday, I was feeling nice and fresh.
Well, I say this with the slight twinge in my right knee from my stupidity giving me a bit of a niggle pre-ride, but nothing bad enough to prevent me from setting off.
This one, on paper, didn’t look so bad.
So during the warm up there were 4x 20 seconds at 90% FTP where I went a bit silly and did some spinning up to 120rpm. Perhaps a little over exuberant. Would it come back to haunt me later in the ride?
After the warm up I was feeling good. Still fresh. Keen, and ready to go.
Three minutes rest before the big job? Come on, let’s get to it!
And so into it we went. Starting off nice and easy 150w for 4 minutes, just cruising.
Then a small ramp up to 190w for 3 minutes. Barely felt it.
Two minutes at 225w? Now we’re starting to work, but I wasn’t overly concerned. This was the “on” pace for an SST session so nothing overly concerning.
Things definitely got a bit tougher than I expected with the minute at 255w, followed by a lovely little finisher up to 295w for 30 seconds.
Unlike most of these Zwift workouts, I wasn’t dropped back to some grey zone easy peasy thing, but 4 minutes at 140w was close enough. More than enough to recover, honestly. I quite liked the constant pressure though, even if it wasn’t very intense.
That said, I was certainly a little less cocky now that my legs had been given a dose of what was in store, and three more repeats to go.
Completing the Neon Flats lap was pretty cool, and having the new route to view really helped take my mind off the workout.
Well, that and having a YouTube video running on my second monitor. And tunes. Lots of tunes.
I really liked that new expansion to the Japan map. Without having ever been to Tokyo before, I cannot say much about how realistic or whatever it would be. But it was definitely visually interesting. There was plenty to see, and much like the Japanese countryside already available, it felt a step up from the other maps on offer. Maybe Zwift devs should go back and visually improve the existing routes to this new standard.
With constant ramp ups this workout was more enjoyable than some of my regular fair.
I liked the intensity of this one. It felt like an SST session in terms of how much I felt like I was being worked out, but that bit more varied.
Calorie wise, this was also a decent burner.
So the coolest aspect of the map for me was one bit that I only noticed on the first lap, but was glad to do a second lap so I could screenshot it.
There’s a cool arcade zone that you pass through…
And if you look at that last screenshot, there’s a few arcade machines with bikes at them, one of which as a guy hitting a hard sprint on the Zwift game.
A super cool touch.
It reminded me very much of the Zwift adverts. Definitely a cool feature.
I would have to ask how well this map plays on some of the lesser hardware that Zwift supports though. I remember when I started out I was on my iPad. I could still Zwift on that iPad today, though thankfully I don’t have too.
The reason I mention this is that at times I got some stuttering and jerkiness, even on a dedicated gaming PC with an ageing but good-in-its-prime GTX 970 graphics card. Surprising. That card handles GTA 5 just fine, yet stuttered on Zwift?
Anyway, all in I enjoyed today’s ride.
Tomorrow might be an SST session. It’s nice to have this one in the bag, and available as an alternative to an SST ride in the future if I get bored of them.
What I would say so far is that the Norseman series has been a solid workout. I’m enjoying the sessions and the intensity feels just right. Let’s hope the final 3 workouts keep up the pace.
