Saturday’s can be a tricky one for me. I often want to ride, but have little time to do anything substantial. I’m also conscious of not doing too much ahead of a bigger Sunday ride.
Combine this with pushing myself hard in yesterday’s race and I wasn’t quite sure what to do with my limited time today.
In the end I opted for a 45 minute free ride. I loaded up the Yorkshire circuit, simply as this was the default option for me. Being in free ride means I did not feel the hills beneath my virtual wheels.
My intention was to take this as a very easy session, spinning at 95rpm but aiming for a low wattage of around 130-140w.
However, after a brief warm up of about 5 minutes I decided to push myself a little, shifting down a gear and keeping up the 95rpm, which took me to around 2.5w/kg.
In hindsight I should perhaps have opted for a true workout, and stuck more rigidly to a fixed target.
Impulsively I decided on 10 minutes on, 10 minutes off. This way I’d do 10 mins in the harder gear, then drop to 10 in the easier gear, and alternate that way.
This went well enough. Though to be honest I was playing pokemon on the switch as a distraction, so wasn’t really paying much attention to what was happening on screen during the ride. Go with the feel, so to speak.
With 10 minutes left to go, I decided to do 5 minutes out of the saddle.
This kinda blew away my active recovery ideas, but it’s something I wanted to try after seeing it mentioned on a GCN video earlier in the week.
Getting out of the saddle is hard. But I feel it is worthwhile for climbing rides. So again, something new to throw into my weekly mix.
Whilst this ride was a 45 minuter, today went fairly fast. Helped on by the gaming distraction, for sure.
I’m still not entirely sure what to ride tomorrow. I’m a bit tired from 5 days riding in a row, though my overall stats for the week are nothing out of the ordinary.
Most likely I’m going to try RGT Cycling’s Majorca circuit. Or, possible, another Vatternrundan group ride.
