Weekly Review January 31st – February 6th 2022

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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. 

This week saw the official end of the Tour de Zwift 2022, a series which I have thoroughly enjoyed and am absolutely feeling in the legs. I still want to finish off Stage 1’s Longer Ride during the make up stages.

Aside from that, the rain and wind have very much returned so I was lucky to get in two outdoor rides this week when it was dry enough to do so. Will I manage the same in the week ahead?

Here were this week’s rides:

Definitely the biggest win, as such, from the previous few weeks has been the uptick in performance.

All those hours on the bike, things like SST and endurance sessions, they may not feel like they are doing very much week in, week out, but when it comes to doing 8 events over a four week period, all that training definitely pays off.

I’ve been super happy to see each events performance numbers. I know the TdZ isn’t a race (though you might not believe it during the events), but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t been working as hard as if it was.

Partly this is to get through these events as quickly as possible. Sometimes that’s because it’s a weekday and I don’t have all the time in the world – just a dinner hour, usually. During that time I also need to shower and eat, so if I can smash out a 45 minute session, I still get my 15 minutes to do the other stuff.

However, another large part is because I intentionally want to push myself. With each ride at 450-1000+ riders, there’s always a group about that will be working at an intensity that will keep me on my limit. Using those other riders as a marker post has been great, and not wanting to get dropped keeps my legs motoring, even when I would really quite like to stop.

In between these TdZ stages I’ve been either outdoors or back on the turbo. Any turbo work will have been at a low intensity – all endurance (or erm, active recovery as I falsely call it). Outdoors, less so. My outdoor rides have always been a mish mash of whatever the heck I feel like, and no change there this week.

I’m aiming to keep this up in the week ahead, hoping to fit in some AR stuff, hopefully at least one outdoor ride, and a couple of TdZ make up events for good measure. It looks like the best chance of me doing Stage 1 Longer Ride is Sunday morning at 9am. The only other viable time is Saturday at 13:30… neither are ideally. But if the weather is pants, and indoor 50km is a good reason to get out of bed on the Sunday.

I started tracking my weight using my wife’s fancy Withings WiFi scale thing a few weeks back. Boy, how the future has improved our lives :/

I’m hoping that by weighing myself at odd points of the day, then throwing in the occasional post ride result, that I am really confusing the artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithms they will almost certainly be apply to the data set. I refuse to believe my crazy dips will be ruled out by judicious use of statistical median.

But no, it is nuts to see a 4lb drop in weight after a TdZ ride. That’s a lot of sweat.

I’m unsure when the next major Zwift series will kick off. The Tour of Watopia is usually a March or April event from previous years so I suspect that will be the same again this time around.

Between now and the next big thing I have a couple of ideas in mind.

So this week is going to be able to continue largely as normal by use of the Make Up Week sessions. Then next week I’m having a proper recovery week. That’s two down, and takes us into the last week of February. Hey, short month.

From there, it may be a few weeks before the TfW so I’m thinking… racing! I’ve not done it in ages and there’s always events to get stuck into, so why the heck not? Seems like a good plan.

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