Right then. What a balls up.
The original plan was one of either:
- Stay indoors, do a Zwift SST session, or…
- Take a rest day
However, the sunshine was abundant throughout the day. And sat at my PC, working, I couldn’t help but look out of the window and think: yeah, I’m gunna go out and enjoy that at clocking off time. The nights are starting to get shorter, and soon this won’t be an option. So, with that in mind, out I went.
The route I plotted was heading West. I’m fairly fortunate in that, from my house, North is flat, North East to East is hilly, South… well, I haven’t done much that way, and West is flat towards the coastline. Plenty of options.
Given that I was going to do an indoor SST session, I figured what the heck, let’s have a smash at that outdoors. Free form style. As in, me going a bit too hard for as long as I can, and then trying to recover, and then doing it all again.
Only, it never really works like that.
Without ERG mode, and in this case, without any form of structure provided by the Garmin, I just kinda did my own thing. Mostly this was me trying to keep above 30kph to, ideally, do the 30km route in approx one hour.
Looking at the stats:
- Best 1 minute: 317w
- Best 5 minutes: 253w
- Best 20 minutes: 230w
Really, nothing spectacular.
But I kept finding myself pushing. I don’t really know why. I didn’t do 5 minutes on, 5 minutes off. It all became a bit of a messy blur. Push to the next corner. Push down this long straight. Push, push, push.
And then: pop.
Fortunately, I only had about 5km or so left to go, because suddenly I felt a lot of pain in my left knee.
Lack of any warm up, stretching, anything sensible on the pre-ride front likely contributed. But right now I’m going to have to live with the consequences, regardless.
I’m hoping that having being able to ride home, that this is a good sign. I’m expecting tomorrow is a mandatory rest day. And all being well, I’ll give Wednesday a trial run at a very easy pace on Zwift. ERG mode locked. No silly business. Hopefully it’s nothing more than a sign to maybe not be so erratic with my “training”.
If anything it’s more frustrating than it is painful. Frustrating that it’s all entirely my own fault. When will I learn?
