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.
It looks like I didn’t do very much this week, but that’s not quite true. I’ve had both injury and illness to contend with, which was a pretty poor way to spend a week off work.
Here are this week’s ride and run:
- Tuesday – Run Flat Legs
- Saturday – Tour de Zwift 2024: Stage 3 [Run]
In between those two I went for a walk on Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday.
The big problem this week has been my right knee. I’m not sure if this was initially caused by wearing bad trainers for this run or just being not used to running, then running for ~40 minutes.
However the damage was done, it was done. That’s the main thing.
My plan for the week was the usual – SST, walk, Race – but I think the SST session put a lot of stress on the joint. Then it wasn’t fully healed when I ran again on it for 30 minutes on Saturday. That simply made it worse.
I think the realistic plan now has to be to do endurance rides at a maximum until it improves.
The really annoying thing is that I wanted to do all 8 events in the Tour de Zwift as runs, and I thought I was on track to do that with my second run on Saturday, but it seems the events are running on a compressed 4 day schedule so by the time I got around to it, I had missed Run #2 in the series.
However I think the most sensible thing to do is not to try to complete that event in full, but rather aim to run once per week as I originally planned. Ticking off some virtual nonsense for the sake of it, for some virtual kit I will never even look at, seems nutty if it’s messing up my actual physical body for the other 6 days each week.
Those are the negatives this week.
On to the positives though.
Well, for a start I did my second run. On top of that I got some proper running trainers, gait analysis, and set up the treadmill properly. All good things.
Also I run a sub 30 minute 5K, which I am really pleased with.
Even more so than when I started cycling a few years back, the prospect of running for 30+ consecutive minutes seemed beyond me before I began this. But thanks to the cardio provided by the bike, the real difficulty was all in the mind. Compared to pedalling around Watopia, running is sooooooo slooooooow.
However when running on Zwift you can set goals for your session, one of which is to run 5km. And in doing so you get extra on-screen prompts and overhead things which really do aid in motivating you to keep going. At least they did for me. I’m surprised they don’t have that for cycling.
Anyway yeah, the plan for the week ahead is different than usual as a result.
I want to ride, but the best thing to do is to take it easy. So, easy rides. I’m going to focus on endurance level efforts and adapt the resistance to accommodate my knee. I’d rather pedal for an hour at 120w and have ridden than not ride. I feel that’s the best approach to take, and adapt from there.
I still plan to run again this week. In an ideal world I’ll do the two runs necessary to satisfy the TdZ, but I’m not putting my body at risk to meet that target.
Overall then, not a brilliant week but it could have been far worse. And running wise the end results were pretty good.