This morning’s ride was perhaps ill advised. I’ve ridden 6 days in a row, and had planned to ride both Wednesday and – possibly – Thursday as well.
I am away early on Thursday morning this week, so that may be ambitious. On Friday, I could (in theory) hit the hotel gym and find an exercise bike. More likely, however, is that I will take the opportunity to have a nice, uninterrupted hotel sleep / lie in.
My legs feel pretty worn out today. I was feeling it yesterday, and riding this morning hasn’t really helped. They aren’t injured. Just tired. I’d like to get another ride in tomorrow as otherwise I’m going to be three days without a ride.
This all leads on to why I’d rather not take a 3 day rest: Zwift’s Tour Of Watopia.
I’ve signed up for the first stage. I’m riding the Road To Ruins on Sunday 7th April 2019 at 9am.
At 18.4 miles, or 29.6km, this is by far the longest ride I will have attempted. I’m confident I can complete it, though I won’t be out to set any records.
There’s a combined 268m of climb / elevation on this ride, so all in that’s about the same as one Box Hill climb. Fairly confident that is achievable.
I’m estimating about 1.5 hours to complete the ride. Not sure how the ride will work, or how my iPad will handle many riders on screen simultaneously. I’ll likely get dropped anyway. I’m sure there will be a few pro’s giving it 400w averages.
My current plan is to ride for about an hour on Saturday morning. Though all that depends on time availability. Saturday morning’s are a busy one for me. There are all the family activities to work through, along with my usual routing of working for 4-5 hours.
Today’s Ride
Aside from feeling a little thrashed before I got on the bike, I awoke late yet again today and finally sorted out my alarm to ensure it doesn’t happen again tomorrow. Never great to wake late, then have to do kid’s breakfasts, all whilst watching the clock rapidly tick-tock down to the start of the working day.
I figured out why my Tacx Neo 2 has been giving me some issues the past few days. The power cable has been unplugged. The Tacx Neo 2 can operate purely under pedal power, or from the mains. With my setup, I need the mains to keep connection whilst I start Zwift, then climb on my bike. Otherwise, I lose the connectivity and my rider doesn’t move in game when I start to pedal. I’m sure this is my youngest’s tomfoolery in action.
Without a structured plan on what to do on my ride this morning, I picked out the Greater London Flat route, which is 11.6km of mostly flat terrain. I say mostly, as about 3/4s of the way around, there is a small climb. Right around the 9km mark.
Once on the saddle, and spinning, I resolved to do two things:
- Keep a high cadence when in recovery / 90rpm+ and around 100w;
- Push hard for 1 minute intervals
To achieve this, I selected the third cock up from the smallest ring at the back, and then alternated between the big and small rings at the front. I have no idea of the proper terminology, nor which gear(s) that equates too. But that’s what I did.
Keeping up a high cadence isn’t true recovery, in my opinion. It’s quite knackering actually. However, the graph shows blue during these stints, and red during the power phase. Who am I to argue?
I was curious as to how my approach might fare in my personal challenge of riding 10km in 20 minutes or less. Alas, again I came up just short.
I wasn’t too interested in going for it today on the Sprint section. I did my best, but my best today doesn’t feel like my freshest by a long stretch.
I’ve connected up my Zwift account to Training Peaks. As yet I am completely confused by Training Peaks. I need to export all my Zwift rides and then upload them, one by one, to TP. Once I’ve done this, I will – maybe – add some of the Training Peaks graphs and stuff to these blog posts. If I can start to figure out just what they mean.
Today I’ve also been informed about VeloViewer which I will be taking a further look into over the next few days. Lots of stats and info to pour through. Most of it, I’m sure, will confirm what I already know: I am really quite unfit.