Sunday morning. Bank Holiday weekend. A time for a lie in, tea and toast in bed, followed by a lazy stroll to the petrol station to buy The Financial Times and check in on my stock portfolio.
Well, alas, no.
How about up at 6am with the kids asking if they can go watch TV, then doze till 7.30 when my alarm kicked in, up, make the kids some Shreddies / junk then jump onto the bike for a session round the Volcano. Yeah, that’s my life.
I quite like the Volcano Circuit. It’s always fairly busy, it’s not too intense, and you can clock up several laps in a fairly short space of time (30-60 minutes). However, what has annoyed me is that Zwift only keeps 30 days of my personal records, and Strava, dear old Strava, has not been keeping track of (almost all of) my efforts.
Today’s ride was to test a theory: Is Strava only tracking the best time from a ride? So, if I ride the same segment 1,3,5,10 times, does it only show the best of the bunch?
It turns out: no. It shows them all. But why has it lost, or not tracked my previous efforts? Really frustrating. I was hoping to use the Strava Developer API to pull out all of my times and create myself a full leaderboard, thus negating the need for Zwift’s 30 day only situation.
Maybe, just maybe, I can re-upload my previous .fit files and Strava will magically resolve the issue. I hope so. Not tried that yet. As such, I only have two previous attempts, and then today’s 7 laps on my Strava graph. So, lesson learned. Yes it does track them all. And no, it isn’t tracking all my previous ones… so no leaderboards for the moment.
Going into this session I knew I wanted to do about 30km. The reasoning behind this was simply to reach my weekly distance goal of 100km or greater. I was at about 70km coming into the session.
One thing Zwift could do better is to display goals on the HUD. I checked my Zwift Companion App twice during the ride, but it didn’t update until after the ride. Bit disappointing.
I’m guessing there was a group ride in progress on the Volcano Circuit as there were plenty of riders in the yellow bib, blue shorts combo. Some of these riders were really strong, and most had done significantly higher numbers of kilometers than I, and were still going faster than I could on fresh legs.
It’s always fun to stick with a pack though, so I tried to keep on their wheels for as long as I could. Which turned out to be about half a lap, in this case.
I felt like I’d given my first lap a good effort, but came in over 7 minutes. My previous personal best at this point was 6 minutes 54 seconds, so by my own standards I was fairly seriously off my best pace.
On the second lap, however, I didn’t feel I’d gone harder or stronger, and yet I managed to put in a 6:53.38, which became my new PB.
There is a world of difference between myself and 18th. It’s something to aim for.
10km in under 19 minutes. Be nice to get this into the 17’s.
This has become my favourite part of the Volcano Circuit. I love the short intense climb each lap. Definitely would not have expected to feel this way 8 weeks ago.
I fell off my pace significantly after the second lap. This tells me I pushed pretty hard, but need to work on endurance. Maybe try to push hard for a lap and a half next time.
I added “ride 3 hours or more a week” as a time goal this week. The Zwift Companion App doesn’t give too much scope for goal definition, so why not use both of the goal types it does offer?
Third lap I was knackered. I gave myself a rest lap.
Fourth lap I did try hard again. I honestly felt like this time would be closer to the very high 6 minutes. Maybe 7:02, 7:05, something like that.
Welp.
After the disappointing previous time, I lost my motivation to keep pushing for better times somewhat. I swapped to focusing on a distance target. 30km, and I would get off the bike (after short cool down).
I was mucking about here taking a few alternative camera angle screenshots for this post 🙂
Before I knew where I was, the short climb jumped me.
I was trying to put an effort in here, and then I got the award and wanted to screenshot that as well, so I fell off as I halved my concentration. Love that climb.
The lap time is a shocker but I’m happy with this. Pretty much 30km in the bag, both goals done, one new PB, and a decent work out.
There’s no sprint in the Volcano Circuit. The short climb is kinda like a sprint.
155w avg felt about right to me. It didn’t feel like a strong ride. I’d say 6/10.
Anything over 500kcal feels like I’ve done ok. Or Nice! as the TSS man would say
I’ll be honest, I do not understand the difference yet between weighted average power, and regular plain old power at this stage. Something to read or watch up on.
It would seem that Zwift believes in me more than I do myself. I am slowly building towards a real FTP test. How long do I think I could hold for 20 minutes? I’d say somewhere between 180w and 200w at this point. I’m aiming to do the FTP test and see how close I get to this figure. Right now, it’s a time thing. I need an hour to do it, and I don’t get many hour long rides.
Bank Holiday Monday tomorrow though Chris, why not then?
A reader
Good question.
I don’t consider the FTP test to be that much of a fun prospect. I’m not that fussed about it. I find the number to be guiding, but I don’t know where too
Instead, I want to ride a KOM on Innsburck map. Innsbruck is a great circuit, one of my favourites. And it’s on rotation tomorrow, for one day only. So yeah, KOM or FTP? KOM.