For this afternoon’s ride I opted for another Sweet Spot Training session, the second (and almost certainly last) of the week.
The reasoning for using this workout so frequently is a combination of two things:
- It’s a great bang for your buck
- It can be done in less than an hour
Here’s the official Zwift blurb on the workout, for those who may be unfamiliar:
Sweet Spot Training (or SST for short) will give great bang for buck. Training at around 90 percent of your threshhold (aka the Sweet Spot) is useful because you can spend quite a bit of time there without building up undue amounts of training stress. You can do this workout as much as you’d like and watch your FTP rise over time.
Zwift Sweet Spot Training blurb
Typically I’d aim to do this workout at 95rpm. For today, for a couple of reasons, I opted for 90rpm instead.
Firstly, I always do 95rpm, so felt 90rpm might give me a slightly different workout. Not sure that was the case, but worth a shot at the time.
The second reason was that I was kinda in preservation mode, ahead of tomorrow’s weekly big climb. However, this workout is probably too intense to allow me to preserve my legs… so, silly me.
Whilst generally I had no issues with this ride – I’ve done it plenty of times by now – I did hit upon one big blip during the second “on” block.
Over several rides now I’ve tried to adopt a more TT position on the bike. This is something I really struggle with. It’s uncomfortable as hell, and I quickly find myself getting sore. It’s as though I’m doing crunches. How the pro’s ride like this for any considerable length of time is beyond me, currently.
Anyway, when I did this today, as the above blip shows I managed to severely dip in cadence, and thus, power. I’m not sure I’m doing that TT position right, to be honest.
The rest of the ride went off without much of a hitch.
Well into the ride I completed the first lap, along the way unlocking the Tick Tock route achievement. Of course, not my first time around this circuit, but the first time since the achievement was introduced, it would seem.
One other thing I’ve noticed lately is the trees of Watopia (and London) seemed to be decked with Christmas lighting.
Now, is it me, or are more and more of the trees getting fairy lights with each passing day?
It really might just be me, slowly but surely losing the plot.
With this ride done, I’ve now covered 121km on the week, and have met my 3 hour weekly riding goal. I have 3km left on the clock to hit Zwift’s weekly 100km riding goal. That will be met with tomorrow morning’s pre-climb warm up ride.
I’m not yet sure what climb I have in store tomorrow.
I’m semi tempted by one of the longer routes, whereby usually I tackle about 1000m of climb, all of which is up hill, so the overall route distance is short.
What I’m thinking about is taking on one of the longer routes, where the climbing is spread out over greater distance. The last time I did something like this I wasn’t that keen on it, however.
When I finished up today’s workout I was just shy of 30km, and also short of 500 calories burned.
As such I did stay on a touch after the workout ended, mainly to see both of those figures reached.
It seems last week by this point I’d done quite a bit more work than I have done this week.
I think I’m feeling the result of a heavier week at this point, honestly. I can’t seem to get my thighs to fully recover, and of course, a hard climb tomorrow isn’t going to do much to alleviate that.
Going into the final week before the Christmas break, I need a strategy to rest my legs a little – ideally two days in a row, perhaps with the following third day as an active recovery ride.
And then I’m going to go for it. The FTP test, mark 2.
I was hoping to do this before Christmas day, but as I’m working right up to the 24th, I don’t think that’s feasible.
We’ll have to see how the next week pans out. I’m definitely feeling much fitter than I was before my last FTP test. So that’s something.
OK legs, one climb coming up!
