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 real mixture this week. Indoors, outdoors, running, walking, it’s all happening.
Here are this week’s activities:
- Tuesday – Crunchy Roll (Outdoors)
- Wednesday – Zwift Games 2024 (B): Stage 2 – Jurassic Coast
- Thursday – MyWhoosh Endurance Achievement Session
- Saturday – What A Stitch Up (Running / Zwift)
Overall a pretty good week. Going outdoors on Tuesday was a refreshing change. I wouldn’t normally have done it, but just as I was preparing to go on MyWhoosh the electrician turned up and wanted to knock the power off. Fortunately it was very dry outside, and I managed to get in a decent ~30km ride over a slightly extended lunch break.
I was reminded why I don’t go out much, with an incident within the first 3km, and a sore shoulder ever since. I think I need a proper bike fit as outdoors in particular something is clearly wrong with my setup.
Also outdoors, that was the first time I had tried the new Shimano 105 setup on the road. Brakes were much better, no issues there. Indexing was way off though, and I could only use a small section of the cassette without some real crunchy sounds. That somewhat spoiled it. The cassette is identical to the one on the turbo, so it must be wear and tear is not evenly distributed.
Back indoors I managed to get in a race as part of the Zwift Games 2024 series. I saw already that we have moved on to Stage 4 so I think I’m not going to get through all the events, unless I somehow managed to do multiple races per week and there is a make up week.
I’m not actually that bothered by this.
As per, I got my backside handed to me. I was expecting a flat course but we ended up doing the reverse Titan’s Grove KOM which left me way out of the back. I really wish I didn’t have to race in Cat B as it’s completely pointless from a competitive stand point. To give some indication, the Cat C group winners finished 2 minutes ahead of me. So what gives there? Like I say, I don’t expect Zwift to ever fix this because they have shown very little desire to change their racing setup now for years…
Fortunately MyWhoosh are here to eat their lunch.
I’m slowly transitioning more and more to their platform. Not only is it graphically more appealing, but the longer term strategy is more interesting to me. If you haven’t tried out MyWhoosh I would strong recommend it. It’s got practically everything Zwift has, and last week dropped a huge update which even introduced Running to their platform. It’s giving me more and more reasons not to open Zwift…
That said, I do have several months free on Zwift currently due to referrals so it’s not like I’m paying for either platform right now.
I’d have been super happy with the week if my run hadn’t come up short on Saturday. I think I over estimated my abilities a touch there, but at least it gives me a target again for next weekend. Basically I tried to run 8km, and fell short by about 2km, taken out by getting a stitch several times. Very odd.
Looking ahead, a similar week would be a good performance I think. I don’t expect to go back outdoors which should give me chance to race more.
At this point I’m sort of looking forward (not in a good way) to the end of month FTP Test. Right now a good outcome feels like holding steady, though I’m not quite sure I’m even at that point.
We shall see.