Weekly Review June 22nd – 28th 2020

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 of exercise, 5 if you include the utter failure of Monday’s run. Three of those days were outside rides, and the fourth was an indoor turbo session.

This week’s exercises was as follows:

I didn’t even blog Monday’s run as it was really rather pointless. I’d done some damage to my foot on the previous run last week and had hoped it would have healed up by Monday.

That wasn’t the case.

And worse, I messed it up again on Saturday whilst horsing around.

But fortunately it seems to have no major impact on my ability to cycle.

The best part of the week was getting in three outdoors rides, particularly the ride early Wednesday morning, hitting the countryside in glorious weather before things got far too hot later in the day.

As the graphs below show, however, I found each day harder than the last and my performances gradually declined as the week went on.

This was most evident in Sunday, when the observant reader will have spotted I didn’t ride at all.

This was partly due to waking late. A ten AM lie in. What an absolute luxury.

But simply I think I slept that long as I needed too, not that the kids were quiet for a change.

The Saturday indoor Zwift session was my first and only turbo ride of the week. And being late to the party, I pushed far too hard early doors to catch the pack.

That was a silly move as I really needed Saturday as a recovery ride, and in riding too hard (by my standards) I scuppered my desire to ride on Sunday.

That said, I think if the weather had been nicer outdoors, I’d have found the desire and got on the bike.

I’ve definitely struggled to get motivated indoors lately.

On that front I want to get a different program setup. So sick of Zwift. Though the new routes may reinvigorate my motivation. Hopefully.

I have been wanting to get GTA 5 Bike mod up and running for a while now, but the problem is I need to either rejig my PC setup or shut down all my office stuff just to go on the bike. Its a lot of lost time doing this, as I have a ton of work stuff running on schedules and stuff. Like a true geek.

But on that front I do have some interesting work in the pipeline for this site, so it’s somewhat related.

I think in some ways I don’t want to ride indoors because Zwift is so formal.

The truth is I felt a degree of anxiety when I hit the Zwift ride on Saturday, worked my nuts off to catch up with the pack, and barely broke into the red on the graph at the bottom of the screen.

I’d already been feeling like my next SST session at 234W as a FTP was going to be really hard work. After all, I struggled with my previous workout, and that was easier (all relative, but still).

At 234W FTP, an SST session is 5m @ 225W, 5m @ 207W, repeated 4 times.

All this work to get to a higher FTP figure and now I see that kind of thing and I find it scary and therefore, off putting.

As such the outdoor rides are a lot more enjoyable as they have no structure. I do my own thing, explore, get in some hard efforts, get in some recovery sections, and with a constantly changing view, it takes my mind off the harder work.

I’m going to force myself to do an SST session anyway tomorrow, as I will have had two rest days back to back and it is, I feel, a good measure of my progress. But I’m not expecting it to be easy, or really, particularly enjoyable. And I think going into it with that mindset is not going to help.

Lastly for today, on the graph above my key critical power figures were:

  • 1 minute – 378W
  • 5 minutes – 247W
  • 20 minutes – 219W
  • 1 hour – 193W

So overall I know I didn’t go hell for leather for a full hour, but I have to question if I could realistically keep say, 220W for an hour right now? And as such, how much emphasis should I be putting on the 234W figure?

I really have no idea at the moment. It’s really just food for thought.

I think I’m letting the stats / fear of the figures kill my enjoyment at the moment.

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