For this afternoon’s ride I took part in the Tour for All 2020: Stage 2 Longer Group Ride with Shayna Powless.
My plan for this ride was to go at a fairly relaxed pace, as I’d quite like to go outdoors tomorrow – weather permitting – and I don’t want to blast myself either today or tomorrow, as in all likelihood I will be doing the Stage 2 race on Monday or Tuesday.
That said, I still need to check the days and ensure Tuesday is a valid day for Stage 2… we may have moved on to Stage 3 by then, in which case all my grand plans will have to be thrown out of the window.
Early doors this one seemed to be going to plan.
I kept a fairly relaxed pace and was feeling really decent about my cadence.
The only gripe I did have was that I couldn’t seem to load up one of my TV shows or films to watch whilst riding. Instead I had to settle for listening to music on YouTube. Tough life.
But after hitting the reverse KOM I started to think something wasn’t quite right.
In the race for Stage 1, I mentioned I’d swapped from using the Tacx Neo 2 to the Favero Assioma DUO pedals for tracking power.
I’d also updated my weight from 69kg down to 67kg.
But hitting the climb, something didn’t feel right.
It was too easy.
Or to put it a different way, it was too easy to maintain ~90rpm without having to drop more than a gear or two.
At this point I realised that Zwift must have reset my trainer difficulty to 50% (default) because I’ve swapped computers. And after a quick check, I found I was right.
Fortunately it doesn’t require a restart to apply the change, so I switched up to 100%. I figure I might as well, as it better prepares me for the real world.
With that change made I found the ride a bit more exhausting, and also I found I was pushing myself a bit harder than I was before.
This was probably most evident towards the end where I decided I’d do the last kilometre as a ramp.
Anyway, aside from that there really wasn’t a huge amount to report from this one. It was a straightforward ride and had it not been for the Tour, I probably would have skipped today… so in that regard it was a success.
I’ve heard rumour that the weather is due to dip considerably from tomorrow.
Right now it’s 22c outside… and here I am indoors riding the turbo and typing things on a computer. Such is my life.
Tomorrow it’s allegedly heading back towards a more British 10c, so who knows how chilly it would be early morning when I’d be heading out.
Whatever happens tomorrow I can be happy enough with my riding for the week. I’ve hit all my targets already, so tomorrow will be a true free ride.
Or maybe no ride at all.
