Just a few short weeks ago, one ride a day was more than enough. Now, I feel like I have legs to do 30km a day and if I don’t, I get frustrated. Granted, that’s 30k over two rides, but still, much better than I was prior to buying the bike.
Having finished work for the day, and having had a bit of a stressful day fighting computers, I needed to blow off a bit of steam. I had to get the tea on, and then I’d get about 30 minutes to do a ride. Being London day on Zwift, I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone:
- Climb Box Hill (ride the London Loop – ~15km, ~220m climb)
- Figure out if having the trainer realism on middle or hard made any difference to my time
I did a couple of things wrong on this ride. Firstly, I went too hard, too soon. By the time I’d covered the first half of the loop, I was a bit knackered. It took a concerted effort to climb that damn hill.
Secondly, my cadence was all over the joint. No awards for consistency on this ride.
When I had done the hardest part of the climb, I couldn’t believe how far ahead I was on my previous personal record time.
This climb felt hard. Having ramped up the “trainer difficulty” to max it was noticeably harder effort to climb this hill than on my previous attempt. I’d advise reading the linked Zwift Insider article as it explains what this setting is, and does. My theory is my rides should be as real world as possible, so I will be keeping this up at max. Maybe I’m a sadist.
I’m really pleased with this time. It’s my best yet, and is a major improvement over my first ever attempt.
The 17 minute attempt isn’t super fair. That was a workout as best I recall. It’s unusual in that as best I recall, workout’s don’t track sprints, so not sure why they track climbs?
My time today versus my time 3 weeks ago is 125% faster. Nice. And more importantly, for me, is that even with a higher perceived effort than my last attempt, I still shaved nearly a full minute off my previous attempt. I genuinely don’t know how I did that. With the Tacx Neo 2 kicking out mega resistance, it certainly felt like my slowest climb yet.
The day / night cycle on Zwift is unusual. That’s all I will say about that.
With the hill done, I tried my best to put in a strong finish. And I managed to beat my previous PB on the London Loop, which I think was helped on by the zippy descent from Box Hill. Zippier than usual anyway.
Over a minute shaved off my previous record.
My 5 minute and 20 minute efforts were either as good as, or equal to my previous bests. My heart rate was pretty scary high for a lot of this ride. Not great.
Funny to see how the middle sets of efforts – the climb – started fairly strong and then got weaker, and weaker, and very weak… then tried a bit harder, and then slightly less… sketchy.
Finally for today I got a guesstimated FTP boost from 156w to 159w. Not entirely sure how I feel about this. Could I realistically keep up 159w for a full hour? I have no idea. Zwift thinks so. I’m not quite so sure.
One thing that I do know is that I’m going to do a workout tomorrow, and maybe even wait until the evening to do it. I really want to get in Jon’s Mix after the #TOW Stage 3 crashed on me. My legs could do with a bit of recovery between now and then. Once again I felt a twinge in my left leg during the climb. Don’t want to blow up.