Weekly Review August 23rd – 29th 2021

Each week I try to review and reflect on my previous week on the bike. This allows me to see how my fitness and ability is progressing on a wider timescale than day to day. For previous weekly reviews please click here

A decent week this week, all outdoor rides, all sunny, and all of a fairly decent length and pace. No complaints.

Here are this week’s rides:

Overall a decent week this one, with everything trending in the right direction.

I managed to get outdoors for every ride which with how the weather has been lately was a real treat in itself.

Perhaps I could have done a better job of doing recovery or lower intensity rides, but truthfully I feel like I’ve got a little something to prove to myself at the moment, so I’m kinda happy with putting in harder rides. Counter intuitively though, I suspect this is actually detrimental in the long term.

I strongly suspect I was most productive, in terms of overall fitness gains, when I was exclusively indoors, and was doing structured workouts most of the time. Those SST sessions, whilst hard, definitely seem the best bang for my buck when it comes to a solid workout that doesn’t overly tax me.

Towards the end of this week it was good to get back into a Productive training status. I’m still not entirely sure how all of this works, but having slacked off in the past few weeks, I feel this must be a kind of lagging indicator. When it recognised that I’d switched back to harder work, I suspect it tipped the scales too far in the other direction and things went awry.

But of course, God knows. I’m largely just making that up as a wild assumption.

As I’m now off for the rest of this week, and as I have over indulged (yet again) over the course of this weekend, I am going to need to continue the harder efforts I feel.

What I’d like to do is to go a little further afield this week, preferably early morning or general day time riding. That’s always a fav. Get out into the country side and just enjoy the calm and serenity. And cows. I do enjoy a field full of cows, gawping at me as I meander past.

The weather looks to remain around 17-20c for the forthcoming week so this should be possible.

I’d also like to get in some anaerobic work, if at all possible.

Also this week I believe the Zwift Academy 2021 series has started. Not been on in a while so am out of touch. If there’s any bad weather, that’s what I’ll look to do.

But yeah, overall a good one.

Let’s hope for more of the same in the week ahead.

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