Today I continued with Zwift’s 12 week FTP Builder training program, with this workout being Week 5 Day 2.
This is a pretty hard one to explain simply, so I have taken the graphs and tables from What’s On Zwift.
I’d highly recommend checking out What’s On Zwift, if you haven’t already, as it’s full of info that’s better presented than on Zwift itself… kinda crazy.
The two blocks I was thinking would be most taxing were the two 5 minute ramps, with the smaller 2 minute ramps in between.
And they definitely were the harder portion of this workout.
As I’ve mentioned several times during write ups of these FTP Builder workouts, the hard part is not the wattage – it’s the cadence.
Forcing myself to stick to a cadence is something I find very challenging.
Often I try to keep to a set cadence for a minute or so, then go faster for the next minute, and faster still for the next minute, and so on.
What I am trying not to do is go at such a high cadence in the first stage of the workout that the middle section is harder than it might otherwise be.
The breaks between the two 5 minute ramps today were mini-ramps themselves, so that was a new one on me.
This first section of the workout was the more interesting of the two overall sections for sure.
For the second section of 3 minutes at 160w followed by 3 minutes at 100w, I can’t say I found this overly taxing.
If anything, I was a little bored on this part of the workout.
One thing I do like about the structured workouts is that I likely wouldn’t otherwise see these through. Say I was at a gym doing a program where I had to keep track of my own progress, I’m fairly sure I’d just skip these boring bits.
One thing that was ridiculous on this workout was the cool down period.
This isn’t the first time I’ve found these overly long cool downs to be a little needless.
In this case, after the four repeats of 160w, I had the 3 minute at 100w block after the final 160w effort. Then I had a 5 minute cool down, again at 100w.
And then I bump back up to 130w and slowly ramp back down to 100w over 5 minutes?
What’s the point, exactly?
I’ve had a look ahead and the next workout in this series is 5x 9 minute blocks at 130w.
However, the read of my right thigh is feeling tight so I’m thinking tomorrow will be a rest day. No point over doing it.
All in all, just another workout on the program, nothing major to report on this one.
I opted for Fuego Flats just to crush some more kilometers. Having not met my distance goal last week, I wanted to make sure I had it in this bag this week. One more training ride and it’s golden.
It’s a bit hard to see on the screenshot above but you can make out the cadence routine I was trying for if you click the image. One minute blocks where I tried to go faster – in terms of RPM – every minute. Feels like a good way to burn the time – but also fairly sure it’s why my leg feels tight now.
I am truly curious as to how much this is all helping me get my FTP above 195w on the next run. Going to be an interesting one, that’s for sure.
