After a couple of days off the bike I was hoping to feel a little better about riding this evening.
For whatever reason, this week I have felt… tired. Really tired. Drained.
My legs, in particular my thighs have just said no. I’ve been mentally drained for other reasons, so I’m not going to beat myself up about lack of time on the bike this week. It is what it is.
With about 1600 people on Richmond, the course was very busy.
I think something might have gone awry with my Tacx Neo 2. For some reason the cobble intensity was back up to 100% this evening. The vibrations through my feet are frankly unpleasant. I need to knock it back down to 50%. I like the realism, but I don’t need to suffer any more than I truly do from the workout itself.
Setting off, I decided I would give it my best shot on the first lap, and then have a second lap with no pressure to best my personal records.
With this in mind, I tried my very best on the first sprint.
I have no idea if this is a true personal best, unfortunately. The last several sprint times on the board were all from FTP Builder workouts, well in the 22+ second mark.
As the graph shows, after the first sprint I’d kinda gone too hard and spent the remainder of the time between the first and the second sprints at a low intensity.
As such my second attempt was, as usual, less capable than my first. Again, unfortunately I have no idea where this is truly in my personal records. I’m sick of moaning about Zwift needing to fix this.
If anything my pace after the second sprint was perhaps a little too high. I tried to keep a high cadence, and perhaps burned myself out a little ahead of the first KOM.
Settling myself in, I decided to aim for 85rpm on the climb, and not focus on the wattage so much.
I definitely messed my gearing up.
When I got to the top, I couldn’t believe how far off my previous time I was.
How could this be?
It dawned on me, quite a bit later, that when I put those times on the board I had been riding just the hilly route. So I was completely fresh for the first attempt.
Not so this time.
Still, it’s good to know what I am capable of.
Before I was ready for it, the second climb was upon me and whilst I started well, I quickly dropped off here. This one was a struggle.
Again, my time was significantly lower than my previous best. And again I was puzzled.
Pushing on round to complete the lap, I didn’t find the final climb as challenging as normal. I think this comes down to there only being ~136m of climb per lap on Richmond. This isn’t insignificant, but compared to a true climbing circuit, it’s over with fairly quickly.
I can’t say I was thrilled with my lap time, but it gave me the indication that another lap would be ~60 minutes (enough!) of riding for the day.
As mentioned earlier, my mindset was simply not to kill myself on the second lap.
Instead, I wanted to get in a solid bit of exercise.
As such I went for ~85rpm where possible, but honestly didn’t succeed too well at this.
Whilst my legs had taken a beating, I used to the second sprints as a means to push myself – just not too hard.
One thing I did differently tonight was to use the drops. Typically I do not use the drops much at all when riding.
I tend to find when using the drops – or rather afterwards – that I get a terrible stitch in the left side of my stomach. I’m not even sure it is a stitch. I think it’s a pulled muscle, though the pain is similar.
For a laugh, check out the timeline graph at the end of this ride write up. The effort trend has a very distinct slope.
For the second KOM attack I again planned to stick to 85rpm. This was much harder than I thought it might be, but the overall time wasn’t too far off my first effort. For once, I was pleased with this.
This was around the time I realised how I’d managed such stronger times on the 30 day PB board.
It’s clear from the second KOM screenshot that I wasn’t quite putting in the same amount of effort on this one when compared to the first. Time for screenshots means something else must be compromised.
One thing I did notice was that my effort was around 3.6w/kg on the climb, and there was a chap doing an FTP test ahead of me putting out similar.
Fortunately for me, I only had to do this for ~80 seconds or so. Not the 20 minutes that person would be on with. Yowser.
The second climb was significantly down, even on the first.
Still, it’s about the exercise. At least, that’s what I was telling myself.
On the run in I hit my 3 hour weekly riding goal. All good. In truth I’ll probably aim to do at last another 2-3 hours over the weekend.
All things considered, I’d have expected my second lap to have been a touch slower than this so I was quite pleased. An hour on the bike. 600+ calories. All good.
I’m ever so slowly climbing towards the 50km climbed tron bike count down. We shall get there. All in good time.
I was quite happy to see 188w averaged over 20 minutes here. Of course, that’s sprinting and climbing for you. The rest of the ride was more like 160w predominantly.
As mentioned, check out the sloping descent of each effort max output. Nice. Like a ski slope.
I’m not sure why I feel quite this tired in my legs lately.
I’m hoping this subsides. The weekend riding will be long, but likely not particularly intense. The FTP Builder workout I have scheduled is only intense in 4 short bursts.
All in all, not a bad ride. Typical Richmond, really.
