Every 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 consisted of 4 days riding, three being outdoor rides and one being an indoor sessions on the turbo trainer.
This week’s exercises was as follows:
- Tuesday – VLOG #9 – Pleasington Climb (Outdoor)
- Wednesday – Virtual Tour de France – B – Stage 6 Discovery Ride (Indoor / Zwift)
- Saturday – VLOG #10 – Trip Through The Trough (Outdoor)
- Sunday – A-Road Recovery Ride (Outdoor)
Three of this week’s rides were memorable ones.
Tuesday and Saturday’s outdoor rides were really fun, largely new routes for me. Both were very heavy in terms of climbing and distance, which helped me break through 200km for the week. I’m not sure if that’s the first time I’ve done that, but it’s certainly not something I do regularly.
The Pleasington climbing ride was a lot of fun, getting out in the sun, hitting a bunch of local routes I have never done before – but certainly will do so again. And I lucked out on a nice Summer’s day to boot.
Following Tuesday’s ride, and on very tired legs, doing the final Zwift Tour de France ride was killer, but it felt good to have completed every route. I really think that new Champs-Élysées map could make an excellent racing circuit. I’ve not seen it on rotation though. Sadly.
It’s been nice to get on some new maps in Zwift. I have to say I am really bored of Zwift at this point. To the degree that I really don’t feel like I’m getting much value from the platform due to lack of use. The one thing I do like about Zwift is the workouts, though most of them are of questionable use, there are some decent ones in there. I still figure I can replicate the good ones directly on the Garmin and ride them on GTA V though.
After two long rides on Tuesday and Wednesday, I took a bit of a breather – helped on by the fact it rained on Thursday and Friday – only to get out once again on Saturday. This time heading to the Trough of Bowland, a beautiful local countryside wonder with a short but brutal climb about half way through.
I really enjoyed vlogging both the Pleasington and Trough rides this week. It makes a difference from just writing up the rides, that’s for sure.
And then to finish off the week I did a true bit of road cycling, up and out for 15km, then looping back. Easy pace stuff, just to get the lacks spinning really.
Off the bike I’m still very much hard at work trying to get BikeClimbs.com up to scratch. I’ve hit on sooo many issues with that site. Typically really. It’s a fairly basic project, but with tons of data. And that data volume is giving me real headaches. Anyway, work has continued apace behind the scenes, and I am looking forward to putting the next version online, hopefully this week.
Looking forward to the week ahead, I have nothing particularly special planned. No routes in mind. There are two I have had on the back burner for some time. One is a century ride up to Southport. Fairly flat that one, but a long ride nonetheless. And the other is to head over to Rivington, which is at the moment just a guess, as Garmin has been down and planning a route on Strava just isn’t that much fun.
The other nice thing this week has been to finally get to ride in some proper cycling gear. The two jerseys I bought were both really nice to wear whilst riding. I managed to get terrible sunburn when riding the Trough – can’t blame the jersey though for that, but at least I have the UV arm protectors for the future 🙂
Right-o, on with the show.
Have a good week all.