Spurred on by Philip’s comment I decided to stick with Zwift’s 12 week FTP builder exercise plan for today’s ride.
Truth is, I also wanted to get the 21km on the board to reach my weekly riding goal of 100km, but I also wanted a fairly light ride as whilst I haven’t done too much this week, what I have done hasn’t been particularly easy.
I was surprised to find I only had 21km left on the week to reach 100km. I thought it was more like 40km.
Without the riding goal, I probably wouldn’t have gotten on the bike today, in truth.
I’ve done this particularly work out now in several different guises. Keep at 140w for 6 minutes, then 100w for a minute, rinse and repeat 6 times.
Mostly for this ride, truth be told, I was alt + tabbed out of Zwift watching a video instead. This led to a mistake in the fifth block as I’ll cover shortly.
Again, I opted for a hilly route just to chew down some of the Tour De France related goal I mentioned yesterday. Anything for a virtual jersey.
As above, the alt + tabbing led to a first for me. I have seen somewhere in the past that pressing tab allows you to skip the current segment of a workout.
Well, whoops. I managed to cut block 5 down by about 4 minutes. Silly me.
As a result of this, I decided to pause the workout and do 3km at a higher intensity to make up for it. Not quite sure that’s how it all works, from a scientific point of view.
But heck, I’m no scientist.
I was a little concerned I wouldn’t make the 21km distance I knew I needed to cover as the remainder of the cool down took the wattage down to a crawling pace, and I was ascending some part of New York I’ve never seen before.
So I cheated. I did a U-Turn to cover the km’s faster on the down hill 😀
Goal achieved.
Not a huge amount to report from this ride in all honesty. I still find New York to be the least interesting map. I find this workout to be decent in terms of exercise, but dull overall.
I saw somewhere on YouTube that it’s better to do these types of workouts – long(ish) periods in a particular zone, rather than doing an interesting workout where everything chops and changes all the time.
Still, I’m not aiming to be a pro, so I guess that’s a really small issue for someone like me.
One thing I did enjoy on this ride was the last little bit where I got out of the saddle (my backside was killing me) and did a small climb. It feels like ages since I last did this. I think, honestly, it was the Richmond Race.
I want to do another race. Got my SRAM Send It series on Tuesday morning. I wanted to get into this one a few weeks ago but had so many mechanical issues that the idea went out of the window. Well, that, and hurting my leg on the Monday prior in that Richmond race.
It’s been a chaotic two weeks in terms of cycling.
I’m really glad to be quickly getting back in the routine of riding now. I’d still like to switch it up to ride mornings, but that is less of a concern for me until I am happy with the work situation.
One thing I did try on this ride was to keep my breathing steady. Can’t be pushing these crazy high heart rates realistically. Don’t need a heart attack.
Steady breathing definitely helps with the heart rate, and I can see this on screen / in real time. However, it’s easier said than done when pushing hard as hell, like on the FTP test.
Who knows what tomorrow has in store. I have a variety of interviews and some other stuff to deal with, so riding won’t be high priority – unless it’s done later in the day. Maybe save it for the Send It.