Yesterday I took on Zwift’s Mountain 8 route, involving ~600m of climb up both the Reverse Epic KOM and the Radio Tower.
Today, ideally, I needed a more gentle recovery ride. My plan, such as it was, was to stick in the blue and green zones. At least, that was what I’d come up with last night whilst laying in bed.
Once I got on the bike, it all kinda went out of the window.
I wasn’t sure how my legs would feel this morning. As it happens, they didn’t feel so bad. I’m wondering if this is partly to do with starting to drink this whey powder stuff after riding.
I wasn’t involved in the purchase of this tub. My Mrs already had some for her gym sessions, and she’d made a good choice – banana flavour. Add a scoop to a small pot of water, shake vigorously, and a few seconds later you have a drink that tastes like old school McDonald’s banana milk shake. Pretty cool.
I’ll be honest, when I saw the price of this stuff – £44.99 at the time of writing – I nearly fainted. Still, it’s a massive tub that should last months.
Given that my legs felt alright this morning, I almost immediately ditched my blue / green plan, and decided to go for my common goal of 10km in 20 minutes or under.
I know this route is mostly flat, but I managed to keep up between 180w-200w for a fairly decent amount of time. I still need to work on endurance, and I’m thinking the Zwift guesstimated FTP I am at currently (180w) is pretty close to what I could realistically do for 20 solid minutes on an FTP test.
After the initial ~5km I needed a short rest. I noticed my resting power is around 140w now, which is where my guesstimated FTP was just a few short weeks ago. I don’t feel that much stronger, honestly, it’s mainly a mental thing.
With 10km done, I was wondering if that’s the fastest I’ve ever done it? I’d love to get under 18 minutes. But perhaps not after a climb the day before 🙂
Just before taking on the London 0.2km sprint, I was mucking around with camera angles. On the building behind – some palace or other, London landmarks are not my forte – it says capesso perduco. I didn’t notice this till checking out the screenshots, and Google translate doesn’t tell me what it means. Is it nonsense?
Now this is crazy. I went for it on this sprint. I was feeling really confident this would be a new PB. And yet…
Only good enough for 4th, and 0.33s off my best ever pace. I was genuinely wondering how I could have done any better there, it felt like I’d given it my all.
All that was left was to reach 15km, and cool down. This screenshot doesn’t do justice to how that looks in game. I look forwards to having a better PC with some nicer graphics, see how it looks then.
10w shy of my all time best 5 second effort reveals why I was 0.33s off the pace on the sprint. So much for recovery anyway. One thing I am happy with is my Everesting progress
30 minutes, 287kJ of work, 171w weighted average power. I’ll take it, honestly. 8 weeks ago I was doing sod all, anything is an improvement, and this is really good progress for me.
Cheers Alistair for the Ride On! It’s really hard to get Ride On’s on early morning rides. Grumpy early riders. I give out about 10 for every 1 I receive. Meanies.
The London 0.2km sprint is clearly visible in the final third of the ride report chart.
What I also threw in was another attempt a few minutes later. Much less powerful here, by percentage. But the idea was to try again for 15 seconds, and give it as good as I could go. Gunna try this more often.
All in, not a world beating performance today, but I showed up, so I can be happy about that.
Not sure what to do tomorrow. Possibly a rest day. Possibly an easier blue / green structured workout over a longer duration. We shall see.