It’s a pity this one is called the Tour de Zwift, as today’s ‘run’ would have been much better titled “the tour of Walktopia”. Only Stage 4 is in France, but hey, why let that spoil a good pun?
The thing is, last run I basically wrecked my right knee. Quite badly. I then went for a long-ish walk on it the next day, which exacerbated the problem.
And here we are, a week later, and I’ve only just felt right enough to do something beyond hobbling round the house. It’s been pretty bad, so running on it today was always going to be a big ask.
I got a decent-ish warm up. I did plenty of stretching, and got everything set up in good time so was able to get on the treadmill and do a light warm up walk at around 4kph around the 400m track.
So far, so good.
Then I switched over to the Tour de Zwift Stage 4 event with about 2.5 minutes to go, and set the treadmill to 8kph to get going with about 10 seconds on the clock.
It didn’t take long to realise, that wasn’t happening.
Not even close.
Within the first 2 minutes I knew it wasn’t going to be possible to run the event in full. The question was whether I would finish the event or not?
I’d opted for the shorter of the two options, with the short one being around 7km and the longer one 10km-ish, I believe. Even 7km is a stretch for my current running abilities.
Once I realised I was going to be walking some, if not all of it, and at a fairly gentle pace (5.5kph was about my limit) I realised I’d be there for over an hour. Yikes. I don’t mind a good two hour walk outside, but indoors, on a treadmill, staring at a very slowly moving, rather badly animated bloke for that length of time didn’t thrill me.
For reasons unknown, I kept at it anyway.
And yikes, it was tedious.
I tried several times to run, and several times was reminded just how physically uncomfortable I felt doing so. This wasn’t the same level of physical discomfort I felt last week, but rather actual stabbing pain with every footfall that made the whole thing extremely unpleasant.
Long story short, it took a bloody long time to get through this. I felt like I earned every single minute of it as well. Zwift unhelpfully reported a very low calorie count, so that wasn’t motivating at all.
About the only good thing was I figured out that with the Zwift Runn, the on-screen bloke began running whenever I set the treadmill to 6.8km. When using the Runn Pod, that was far less consistent.
The best effort I managed was the final kilometre where I bumped the speed up to 8.5kph. For whatever reason, after an hours walking I was perhaps loosened up enough to be able to do that effort without anything like the pain I’d had at the same pace an hour earlier.
I guess I might be paying for that come tomorrow morning. Time will tell.
What I’m aiming for is to get back on the bike and do some light riding this week. It’s been frustrating as hell being sidelined, and I feel like it’s all because of this running. Which, I guess it is. But I am equally determined to complete (as much of) this series, because I am a fool who, once committed, will see it through.
What I can say, quite clearly, is that running in my current state a-sucks.
