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.
Overall a really enjoyable week on the bike this week. I managed to get outdoors every weekday at lunch time for a good hour’s ride, and Sunday was a new PB up the Alpe du Zwift. That surprised me as I thought I’d probably pushed too hard all week, what with not having at least one recovery / endurance ride thrown in.
Here were this week’s rides:
- Tuesday – Rubber Gloves & Bib Shorts (Outdoors)
- Wednesday – Oh Sheep (Outdoors)
- Thursday – Blowing (Outdoors)
- Saturday – Spring Started A Day Early (Outdoors)
- Sunday – Tour of Watopia 2022 Stage 3: The Queen (Indoors / Zwift)
Being outdoors so much this week, I went without a recovery ride. I don’t think that’s sustainable if I were to repeat it every week, but blasting out 30km each lunch time was definitely a total luxury that I am very grateful to have enjoyed.
The only downside each day was the strong winds. At times it felt like cycling through treacle, pedalling into a whacking head wind. Also, those head winds seem to follow me around – where’s the associated tail wind when coming back in the opposite direction? It’s an outrage.
Spring started yesterday and it definitely has felt noticeably warmer over the last 5 days. I’ve managed to ditch both the jacket and the gilet. Next up is to buy some winter kit in the sale. Always thinking ahead. I do need another pair of thermal bib tights, and ideally another hooded jacket. Let’s not kid ourselves, the cold weather is rarely too far away in the UK.
For each ride this week I managed to hold around 200w for the duration. That’s pretty intensive by my standards. As I say above, I kinda expected that to be detrimental to the AdZ climb, but amazingly I managed a new PB… only by 3 seconds, but I’ll take it.
What I’m mainly trying to work on lately is controlling my heart rate through vary intensity efforts. I’m pretty happy sitting around the 140-150bpm range at 200w. That feels like huge improvements from where I started at three years ago.
With similar thoughts in mind, it was all about punchy little efforts on AdZ, then allowing the heart rate to come down a bit before repeating. On my previous attempt I tried to hold steady around 235w for the whole climb. That’s easier said than done, and I feel like I fared better with the punchy approach. Funny that.
Generally happy on the weight front. Not looking like it’s going to come down below 67kg, even though I keep cheating and only weigh myself after a ride 🙂
Actually I’m not at all fussed about this. I wonder how much difference 1kg would make up something like the AdZ – probably a few seconds but nothing show stopping. Of course I could be wrong.
But overall I’m sitting between 66-67kg whenever I do a weigh in, so I’ll be keeping it locked in at 67kg for now.
I think that’s about the healthiest my Garmin stats have looked in a very long time.
How long I can keep up the 6 hour riding weeks for, I don’t know. Hopefully a good long while. It definitely helps having the outdoors available for variety, and the Tour of Watopia for structure. There’s only two events left though now of the ToW, and both are considerably easier than the AdZ so it should be fairly smooth sailing from here on in.
For the week ahead, we have an alleged heat wave heading our way. So, it will be all outdoors where possible.
Then the clocks go back (or forward?) at the end of the week, so it’s opening up even more possibilities. Lovely jubbly.
The only plan then is to keep on doing what I’m doing. See out Stage 4 of the ToW, and get in as many ~200w outdoor efforts as I can when the sun is shining. Let’s hope for a touch less wind though, and ideally no more angry sheep.