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.
Not the week I had in mind, but fortunately I managed five rides all the same.
Early in the week I managed to pull a muscle in my shoulder. Not sure how I did that – suspect it was from lifting a heavy box or two, yet I had no pain at the time, it only came on the following day. Whatever caused it though, I decided to take it easy and build back up. No point risking it.
I guess that’s a big benefit of being indoors. The ability to ERG it out at a low intensity, and perhaps more crucially, not getting the constant jolts and knocks sent up through the bars thanks to the crappy road surface.
As that wore off later in the week I was able to up the intensity and get back to where I’d wanted to be.
Here are this week’s rides:
- Tuesday – Sad Sack With A Bad Back (Indoors / Zwift)
- Wednesday – Slow & Steady (Indoors / Zwift)
- Thursday – Upping The Intensity, But Not By Much (Indoors / Zwift)
- Saturday – Sweet (Indoors / Zwift)
- Sunday – Volcano Flat Pace Partner (Indoors / Zwift)
A low intensity midweek then, with a higher intensity on Saturday thanks to an always enjoyable Sweet Spot Training session.
It’s interesting to see how much the training load has dipped coming back indoors. Looking back at the stats in Training Peaks that seems likely because outdoor weeks were, on average, between 500 and 1,000 calories more intensive for the same amount of time ridden.
Part of this may change once I switch back to doing a couple of harder efforts each week. I have to say I’m not looking forward to that particularly, but needs must. And I was seeing some great positive movement in doing that.
I’m really hoping to find some sort of several week structured workout series to follow. One thing I do like about Zwift is their large series things like Zwift Academy or the Tour of Watopia. I’ve been scanning the bigger Zwift sites to try and find something that fits, but no joy just yet.
One other thing I’m wondering is if I can get my harder effort activity mixed in with a race each week. So for example, do an FTP Test on the Tuesday, then an endurance ride Wednesday, and a race on Thursday.
All of this needs doing on a lunch break, and I don’t have a fixed time for that, so it does make the race time really hard to hit.
But I guess that’s the plan.
That then leaves Saturday and Sunday to be ‘something else’ – where that can be open and free to interpretation. As I say, that’s what I was doing outdoors recently, and I was seeing good progress with that regime.
Weight-wise, I’m not worried but a massive uptick yesterday. I put this down to curry. Lovely.
Essentially I over ate, and then because of the high salt content I was necking water at a higher rate, and I think that influenced the weight. I expect that to tick back down … or I hope it does 🙂
I had some technical issues pulling that screenshot over the weekend when prepping this post.
Speaking of tech issues though, I have managed to switch the gaming / Zwift PC over from WiFi to Ethernet, and so far so good. No connection drops, very smooth all round. It’s also much faster to transfer my mountain of post ride screenshots to my work PC so I can do my write ups.
One thing I haven’t tried yet is my bluetooth / pixel buds. I guess they should be equally improved.
Also my cycling table arrived early this week, and so far that’s been proving very useful. Not sure how I coped without that. I’ll put up some photos next week, if anyone is interested.
Last thing then this week. I got my Zwift email through after ZA2022 had finished. Those are my numbers.
I’m a bit disappointed not to have managed to fit in the Workout of the Week last week as that was, allegedly, a workout from ZA2020. But I couldn’t find the workout from that year that matched. Either way, it looked significantly more challenging than the workouts from this year’s Zwift Academy.
Anyway, I want to get in a fairly intensive week this time around. FTP test, a race, and either another SST or a more intensive workout. Not expecting to get more than my usual ~5 hours done, but I want to make them count as next week is going to be more sporadic.