Weekly Review November 2nd – 8th 2020

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. 

This week was made up of five riding days, of which four were indoors and one was a very short outdoor ride which I didn’t bother blogging. In short I cycled home from dropping the car off for an MOT, and it’s only 2km so not a whole lot to write home about. That said, I did smash myself on that ride, which might have been a bad idea, as I shall cover below.

This week’s rides were as follows:

• Tuesday – Zwift Academy 2020: Workout 5 | Primed FTP (Indoor / Zwift)
• Wednesday – Zwift Academy 2020: Workout 6 | Alternative Sprints (Indoor / Zwift)
• Thursday – Lazy Thursday (Indoor / Zwift)
• Friday – Ride home from car garage (Outdoors / Not blogged)
• Saturday – Truly Active Recovery (Indoor / Zwift)

The week started well enough. My plan from last week was to continue on with the Zwift Academy workouts, trying to get through them all before my Zwift subscription expires on the 12th November.

I had a decent session on Tuesday. I’d realised the mistake I’d been making by using the laptop to run Zwift. I’d paired back to the Tacx Neo rather than the Assioma pedals, and so was being screwed out of ~20w or so, which really add up over longer efforts. Essentially forcing me to ride above threshold for prolonged periods in some cases.

I mean, that’s a great workout, but unsustainable for every ride.

After having realised that mistake last week, Tuesday’s ride was easier than usual. I still got a good sweat on, don’t get me wrong, but I was “comfortable” seeing it through.

And then Wednesday night, having not felt so thrashed after Tuesday, I continued on with the next Zwift Academy 2020 workout but had a ton of troubles with that ride. ERG mode just seemed to fail me, hard. A shame, as the final two intervals of that ride looked really useful.

At this point I should state that early in the week I started to feel a bit rough. I was having a bit of tightness in the chest – somewhat similar to how I felt earlier in the year.

I tried to man my way through this. Pretend it wasn’t there. But as the week went on, it has got worse. I’m now at a point where I’m fairly breathless walking around the house. Certainly any serious activity is a struggle – lifting, walking at a fast pace, going up stairs – are all causing coughing and that irritates the lungs further.

Now, given that my eldest has been sent home from school due to a kid in her class being infected with Covid, and given that we’re on yet another national lock down, I’m going hazard a guess that I am infected, yet again. I mean, ffs. I barely leave the house. Clearly the kids are bringing it home, and there’s very little I can do to self isolate from them!

So, as I started to feel worse and worse, my riding towards the end of the week took to recovery only.

I did ride home after dropping the car off at the garage, but I went stupid on that ride. It’s only 2km or so, so I decided to do three silly things. One being race a car down the street, another being trying to set a new outdoor personal power record up a short but steep-ish climb, and the last being going hard in the saddle up the little hill over the train track. Quite an eventful 2km.

I came home with my lungs burning. I tried to tell myself it was just the cold air, no warm up, and me being silly. Which it probably was. But combine that with already problematic breathing, and that was a stupid idea. Classic Chris.

My plan is simply to do recovery rides for the foreseeable. I’m going to have to forget finishing the Zwift Academy 2020 for now. I can do the workouts at a later date, but in order to complete the event itself I need to do the electives. There is the possibility of doing them as the easiest group rides. I can turn up, do between 110-125w and just cruise it.

This also throws out the point of switching platforms to The Sufferfest, as I’m going to be suffering – in a very different way – for about 5 weeks now, if last time was anything to go by. I can’t afford to risk it with big sessions just to finish some virtual event to claim a computerised jersey, unfortunately.

I’m honestly really down about all this.

No plans for the week ahead. I’ll ride as and when I can face it. Probably not tonight. I want too. But I’m really concerned it’s a terrible idea at the moment. I guess the bike will always be there when I’m feeling better.