Weekly Review April 20th – 27th 2020

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Each week Zwift sends me an email summarising my activity for the week. For previous weekly reviews click here.

Sometimes the stats are wrong. Like this week.

Wrong or not, I didn’t do a huge amount of Zwift work this last week. Perhaps I should have done. More on that a little later.

Last week consisted of four rides:

For the second week in a row, I didn’t ride on a Sunday.

And that’s because I had a crash on Saturday.

It was a week of firsts for me on the bike.

  • My first 50km outdoor ride
  • My first real outdoor climbs
  • My first outdoor accident (aside from when practicing in the garden)
  • My first VLOG’d rides

Probably the strangest thing of the week was in thinking there had been an indoor ride in between my two outdoor rides of the week. I was very confused by this when I came to look back on things after Saturday’s ride. That said, after Saturday’s ride I was absolutely exhausted.

I started the week with a fairly intensive 2x 15m FTP session. I’d been wondering how my performance really measured up after my illness, compared to before my illness.

As I’ve covered previously, I understand that prior to illness I was at a Zwift given FTP of 218w. This was as a result of hard riding / racing during the Tour of Watopia 2020.

After illness Zwift didn’t drop my FTP, but I tentatively popped in 214w on the Garmin Edge 530, and after a few outdoor rides, the Garmin told me that hey, my FTP was more accurate around 211w. Sad trombone.

I mean, I knew I’d dropped off somewhat, but seeing it on the screen was a bit of a bummer.

The 2x 15 session was taken at 215w and was to be used as a solid indicator of my current fitness level. It was a struggle in the last 10 minutes, but I got through and felt like I could have bumped it up 5w and still seen it through.

All in all, a happy start to the week.

Outdoor Action

After the hard Tuesday workout, I took a nice easy recovery ride on the Wednesday. Another Zwift session. Just a long, blue zone ride with very little to think about other than wishing the hour was over and done with. Not the most enjoyable of rides, but required every now and again.

On Thursday I decided to get out on the open roads as it was such lovely weather. And the UK Government have stated that we are now allowed to be a little more “ambitious” with our workouts. Well, that wasn’t their exact words, but paraphrasing, they allow us to go and do a workout so long as we aren’t driving to get there. Or something. Hell, I’m not lawyer.

Whilst I was out, I decided that the views were so nice, it would make for a really cool space to change things up a little for my blog. Rather than stick to pictures, why not make a little video and share it on YouTube?

So that’s what I did. My first VLOG.

And I really enjoyed the process. Nothing grand here. Just in many ways more fun to make videos when outdoors than stick to “stills”.

I perhaps misjudged the amount of time it would take to do 30km outdoors on my Thursday ride, but by and large, I felt like it went well.

In complete contrast, what could have gone better with regards to Saturday’s ride would have been in understanding my own abilities a bit better, and also taking some food with me on the ride.

50km on the bike wasn’t outside my comfort zone. But throw in 800m of climb, and 24c weather, and I definitely misjudged both the length, and intensity required for this one.

Things started off well enough – well, as well as could be expected. I found the first climb challenging, but not insurmountable.

The descent… well, that was scary af. Letting my fingers off the brakes for just a moment and I was hitting 40kmh. And the road surface was hardly smooth sailing.

Unfortunately where things went pear shaped was when I hit the bottom of the first climb, stopped to take a picture of the hill behind me, and promptly fell off the bike. My right wrist took the full brunt of the impact, but also cuts and bruises somehow on both legs, and a whacked my shoulder to boot.

Good times.

How I managed to make it through another 25km with that damage, I genuinely do not know. By Sunday morning – and still now, as I type this – my wrist has ballooned up good and proper. However, very fortunately it is significantly better today than yesterday.

My whole point of staying indoors during this COVID crap has been to:

  1. Not fall off / get hurt, and as such…
  2. Not end up having to go to hospital

So I’ve had to suffer for my own stupidity by popping anti-inflammatory pills and hoping for a speedy recovery.

Probably the oddest thing of this week is the difference in power that seems to be recorded by the Tacx Neo 2, and the Favero Assioma DUO pedals.

Seen above, the two outdoor rides are registering significantly higher peak power efforts than my indoor rides.

Why is this?

I calibrate my pedals before each ride. According to people I trust these pedals should be super accurate, so either I genuinely am much stronger outdoors (hmmm), or something isn’t quite right here.

Any thoughts on this gratefully appreciated – please leave a comment below.

Anyway, frankly I’m amazed I’ve been able to type this much with just my index finger on my right hand. However, my wrist is killing… so I’m calling it a day. Hopefully tomorrow will be a nice recovery ride on Zwift where I can avoid having to grip at all with my right hand.

And the weather in the North West is supposed to tank this week, so outdoors may be off the cards regardless until the sun resumes.

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