For this afternoon’s ride I didn’t have a huge amount of time, so had to opt for the most efficient use of that time.
Therefore I used 30 minutes to hit up Emily’s Short Mix, opting to potter around the Volcano Circuit for the session.
It’s a while since I’ve done Emily Short Mix. And at just 30 minutes in length, the whole thing seemed to fly by, with the exception of the final minute.
In truth, I think a 30 minute session is no longer enough for me. I find it far too rushed.
Still, 30 minutes is better than nothing. And we do pack a lot into those 30 minutes in this session.
To begin with I was taken by a sluggish feeling.
It took a genuine concerted effort to get up to 90rpm, and even more to make it up to ~95rpm.
I think this is in large part to having yesterday off the bike. It’s always harder for me to resume after a rest day.
Whilst only covering ~16km or so, I did manage to meet the 100 km weekly riding goal.
This is good as I don’t plan on riding on Zwift tomorrow.
Thanks to the magic of Amazon’s 1 day delivery, I have now received the Elgato HD60 Pro streaming / video capture card. And so far, good news! It does indeed appear to be working.
At least, the streams I have captured have not been pink tinged. Thank God.
As I finished this one out I managed to level up, hitting level 23.
I’m fairly sure doing workouts gives extra bonus ‘drops’ or XP or whatever it is that Zwift uses as a leveling up metric. I seem to be going through the levels at a fairly consistent pace. Typically in games, the leveling up process takes exponentially longer.
As above, the final minute was by far the hardest part of today’s workout.
I am definitely finding this workout easier than I was a few months back, and again, this hints at an uplift in FTP.
However, it’s not easy. The act of pushing for 9 minutes and lifting every 3 still pushes me way out of my comfort zone. At 230w I’m in the 3.2w/kg range.
OK, so only 300 calories done.
Not the most intensive of sessions. Take away the 6 minutes of warm up and cool down, and the 9 minutes at 170w and that really only leaves 12 minutes of hard work out of the 30. But hey, I’ll take it.
Tomorrow’s ride will be a climb.
I’m not entirely sure what that climb will be, just yet, as my Tacx Software demo membership has expired. I’m now in a place where I can activate my 30 day trial period (I hope) and do some decent video rides, along with a full review of the experience. Looking forward to that, and this should see me through all of December, too. Good stuff.
I’m a touch concerned as I write this as I have a twinge in my left knee. This has only just seemed to make itself known to me, and I’m writing this several hours after my ride. I’m hoping it will settle down or ideally disappear entirely over night.
I’m still waiting to tackle the 2x 15 minute FTP interval ride. Today would have been a good day for that, had I not wanted to save myself for tomorrow.
And also, had I actually had an hour to ride instead of ~30 minutes.
Tomorrow will be the proper test of the last two weeks worth of progress.
