It’s been a bit of a poor week in terms of cycling activity. I did a light-ish workout on Tuesday, knackered up my knee, and then spent Wednesday and Thursday recovering.
I’d been giving the whole “what’s coming next” aspect of the Tour de Zwift a bit of a miss. Not wanting to psyche myself out over the hills, when they inevitably came. Only, Reddit’s /r/Zwift kinda gave the game away to me on Tuesday night. So I knew what was coming, and when I woke up on Wednesday with a twinge in my knee I thought better of riding, and decided I’d do it Thursday instead.
Thursday came and I thought well, you know, Alpe du Zwift, coming off the back of a bad knee… not a great idea. I’ll do a light ride instead. Work had me in late, and by 5pm I thought well, you know, another rest day… it’s not so bad, right? Gives me more recovery for a really hard ride. I’ll do it tomorrow, I promise.
Friday came and boom. Headache of the century. This was almost certainly caused by a truly terrible nights sleep on Thursday / Friday morning. Bad dreams, kids crying, waking up at least four times that I know of. Eugh. So yeah, skip Friday, too.
Then today. Hmm. Well, given that it wasn’t raining, wasn’t too cold, and generally looked “outsideable”, the tough choice was made to skip climbing the Alpe and instead, get in a session outdoors.
I planned my route to take me to my nana’s house first, popping for a doorstep chat, and then to continue onwards for a 40km ride. Only, I’d left it pretty late in the day for a start, and had we talked for a while, it might have been going dark before I got on my way. So I tried, rather fruitlessly, to reverse the route. I figured it would be fine to pop round to see nana in the dark on my way home.
Given that I work all day with computers, it really should come as no surprise that sometimes, they are massive pain in the arse. Would the reverse route upload to my Garmin? Would it pump. No matter what I tried, and I tried a lot of things, the route wouldn’t go up. So in the end I decided to sod it and just free ride it. And then, would you believe it? The damn thing just worked, and my route loaded. Alas, 25 minutes late out of the door, I was on my way.
I’m not entirely sure how the Garmin knows about some segments and not about others, but one it does regularly prompt me with is north bound on Garstang Road. And God knows how I got a personal best over 47 seconds faster than I went today, because I felt like I was giving it everything I had. An ominous portent for the ride ahead? I don’t know. I put it down to a head wind today and a tail wind that day. Or maybe my Christmas diet.
As I was heading outbound, still with a good 30km of distance remaining, the sun was starting to set.
That’s a major issue for me, as I don’t have lights. Still.
I also realised I’d forgotten my saddle bag. So no lights, no spares, and not a whole lot of time remaining to get in the distance. I decided to cut one turn off the route, effectively slicing off about 10km or so. Sucks, but it had to be done. And good thing I did, too, as it was very dark by the time I did get back home.
Anyway, as punishment for turning off early I was met with some flooded roads. That sucked. By and large it was wet, but not soaking out today. Crawling through these puddles put a bit of a damper on things though.
What I tried to do was keep at 3.2w/kg for long periods of time. Didn’t do so well on this, truth be told.
The reasoning behind this was to get in some prep for that Alpe climb. That’s a 3.2w/kg average if you want to break the hour mark. And I do. And I have done before, so I want to do it again. But I think my fitness has dipped since the last attempt.
It looks like the Alpe stage is available until Monday.
If the weather holds tomorrow I will almost certainly head back out. The bike is still dirty, and frankly I would rather be outside at the moment than in. These lockdowns suck, no doubt about it. But they suck even harder in winter, when it’s cold and dark, and I can’t escape in the evening. Spending all day at the computer only to spend another hour cycling in front of the computer is just a distant second place when it comes to a choice between that and riding outside.
It’s just the way it is.
