Weekly Review April 28th – May 3rd 2020

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

This week, however, they did not. Perhaps because I didn’t do that much Zwifting last week.

Anyway, no worries, here’s the Training Peaks summary to keep us going:

Straight up, I did not meet my weekly Zwift goals this week.

This would be my:

  • Ride 100km, or more
  • Ride 3 hours, or more

I did hit these goals in total, just not on Zwift. I’m wondering if that’s why they didn’t send me the email.

I’ve had no end of computer troubles over the last three days – all starting with a botched upgrade of my operating system on Saturday afternoon – so the stats look completely weird compared to usual, as I have had to get them from my Macbook. Excuse the odd font.

As above, even though I didn’t hit the Zwift goals, I did meet the goals across all four rides. These rides were as follows:

The most enjoyable ride, as usual when I do get outdoors, was the outdoor ride. However, that ride wasn’t without incident.

In some ways I took things easy last week, particularly early in the week as I was riding with a really badly bruised wrist. I’m not sure if it was / is fractured / broken, or just bruised honestly, as I refuse to go to hospital during this Covid19 situation.

I’ve said in the past that if I’m going to ride outdoors, it’s on my own head and I have to take responsibility for my actions. Falling over and hurting myself is 100% my own fault.

My wrist is getting better each day. It’s still not 100% – I’d say it’s about 85% today – so all rides have been done wearing a big wrist guard.

That thing seems to be doing a good job. It gets a bit sweaty, but it’s getting me through the rides without much issue. What I will say is it’s certainly more painful to ride outdoors with the uneven roads than it is to ride with it on Zwift.

Also it can’t be used as too great an excuse as I was able to do some full gas sprints on Thursday in a bid to give my new chain and cassette a proper (indoor) road test. Happy to report, all is good on that front.

One thing I’m still scratching my head over is why my outdoor stats do not match my indoor stats. Seemingly the Assioma DUO pedals are reporting between 20-30w greater power than the metrics reported by the Tacx Neo. As I said last week, I’m placing more faith in the Neo, simply because it’s the stats I’ve used all along. It does make me wonder if I’m under representing myself though.

Lastly for this week, the big news is I have now moved rooms. My bike is now in my new office – which is still decorated as a kids bedroom.

I’ve set up all my computers, reinstalled everything that needed fixing, and got Zwift up and running in 4k.

That’s cool.

I’ve also set up my bike so I can do live streams which is quite exciting. Not quite there with that part of the setup just yet. But it’s always a work in progress. I won’t be doing any live streaming in the immediate short term – still plenty of tech stuff to figure out there for the moment, but I’ve laid the ground works.

Lastly for today I opened up the Zwift Companion App earlier and spotted the Tour For All has started. I was going to head out on the open roads tomorrow if the weather is anything like it had been this afternoon. However, I’ve signed up for my first stage of the tour – going with a group ride to kick things off, so will be doing that at 9am, all being well.

There’s likely a ton of other stuff for me to cover today but frankly, I’m absolutely exhausted. Moving rooms has been a total killer, and some other real life stuff has also been draining me. I’m technically holiday from work at the moment – should have been in Tenerife as I write this – but instead, here we are in sunny Preston.

OK, enough from me. Hope your week has been a good one, and here’s to a fantastic Tour!

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