Weekly Review July 25th – 31st 2022

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 week that started strong and then hit a wall on Friday. I’ve never experienced anything like hitting the wall / bonking before, though can take away lessons from that ride. I’m kinda pleased with myself that I didn’t then do another big ride the following day – though that was possibly because it chucked it down on Saturday, rather than me being sensible.

Anyway, here are this week’s rides:

• Tuesday – Did Well On Beacon Fell (Outdoors)
• Wednesday – See The Sea? (Outdoors)
• Friday – I Think I Bonked (Outdoors)
• Sunday – Cadbury’s Caramel (Indoors / Zwift)

I’ve now got 2 weeks left of my (overly) long break between gigs. Truthfully I’m hella bored at this point. As the kids have been off school now for the first of their six week summer holiday I am also not able to schedule my own days quite so easily. No big deal, as above I did get to do some longer rides last week and I suspect that can continue this week, too. But still, I have to be reasonable in my timings.

Things started well for me during this week. The Tuesday ride felt strong and was a decent length with a few good efforts in there. All good prep for the forthcoming FTP test.

Equally Wednesday’s ride, whilst a bit of an unplanned meander, was all about helping me get more comfortable riding for longer than my usual one hour stints. If anything the biggest gripe about that ride was road traffic. What’s new?

Friday’s ride was actually going super well until it all came to an abrupt halt. I’d TT’d myself, again in prep for the FTP test, really pushing myself for a good 40 minutes. I was feeling decent… until I wasn’t.

The biggest takeaways from that ride are:

1. Fuel properly before an intense ride
2. Fuel properly during an intense ride

Turns out a couple of slices of toast an hour before setting off, and one midget gem and half a bottle of water aren’t enough to sustain forty minutes of hard effort. Who knew?

Fuelling, or more accurately, eating is something I have been enjoying a little more than usual as of late. During my break from work I’ve translated boredom in to over eating. As the table below shows:

I’m yet to update either my Garmin or Zwift with my correct weight. At the moment that’s averaging out to 68kg, and with the way (no pun intended) things are going, that’s soon to be 69kg. There’s no visible impact to me that I can tell – no belly flop, yet – but I do need to reign it in a bit.

It’s probably alcohol.

Since being off I’ve switched from having a bottle, maybe two, at the end of a Friday, to having one, maybe two, most nights of the week. Again, boredom. That will get knocked on the head once I start up paid work again, so I’m not sweating it. In truth I’ve probably been most accurately around 68kg for a while now, I just choose to weigh myself when I know I’ll be light. Cheating myself only.

The one other thing I have been meaning to mention on here for the last two weeks is where I got up to with my push up challenge.

Well… nowhere. I never got back in to it. Laziness, I think. Or the lack of desire to form a new habit. I know I wasn’t doing them properly, and then I injured myself. After that, I just never started back up. Kinda regret that. My upper body is trash. But still, no plans to restart… I don’t have enough desire. I’ll need to work on that, mentally.

So plans for the week ahead:

Pretty simple one this week. Keep riding, obviously. Get in another longer ride, ideally 1.5-2 hours. I’d like to throw in an SST session, because I need it and the weather looks like it’s going to be fairly Zwift friendly. And then it’s going to be a short rest (2 days consecutive) before hitting the FTP test.

I’m going to do the 4DP test. So that should be a right laugh.