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.
Last week’s review coincided with the end of Quarter 3, so that one was a little different. Normal service resumes this week.
All indoors, and all Zwift this week.
Overall a harder week than usual, and I suspect this format will continue now for the next 5 weeks.
Here are this week’s rides:
- Tuesday – Ugh… Late Afternoon & Late For Meetings
- Wednesday – Tour of Watopia 2023 Ride: Figure 8 (Standard)
- Thursday – Race Watopia: Stage 1 – Beach Island Loop
- Saturday – Tour of Watopia 2023 Ride: Three Little Sisters (Longer)
I was a little late to the party with regards to getting my Tour of Watopia 2023 Ride (err, “Fall”) series underway. Yes, it turns out there has already been a Tour of Watopia in 2023 already, which really screwed up my category naming system.
The plan had been to do the SST session on Tuesday as usual, and then tackle the Standard length ride on Wednesday.
This would be in place of my usual ‘easier’ ride. And that one accounts, partly, for why the week was more intensive than usual. I feel I went a bit too hard in that ride, mostly to get the distance covered in my dinner hour, whilst still giving myself time to shower and eat.
Then Thursday came around and it was race day.
Typically I get slaughtered in races anyway. We’ve covered that many, many times before.
That said, normally I tend to do better on the flatter races, at least in terms of being able to stick with the front bunch for longer.
Not so on Thursday.
I got dropped at the end of Lap 1 (of 2) on the Beach Island Loop, and the second lap was an absolute slog. Friday’s rest day could not come soon enough.
Then Saturday.
Lately I have been doing climbing rides on Saturday, mostly using the Climb Portal, in a bid to push myself to improve with another hard ride each week.
Well, with the Tour of Watopia available I figured I would swap out the Saturday climb ride for the Longer variant stage ride.
I thought I’d done alright on this one. Nothing stellar, but “alright”.
Turns out I was nearly 10 minutes down on my previous attempt at the Three Little Sisters route. Yikes. That’s a massive dip, and I couldn’t have said I wasn’t trying.
Not great.
Possibly the midweek rides had some impact on that, but I do feel overall I am just down generally in terms of performance.
Actually on this point I went digging, not too deep, but a little bit when preparing these stats for this post.
It looks like one potential reason for the form dip is the large drop in the number of longer rides I am doing recently. I can’t even remember the last time I did a >2 hour ride. Heck, most barely come in at 1 hour.
Maybe that’s it?
Beyond that, the only other thing I can think of is I never bothered to order any more of that protein powder stuff when I last finished my ‘jar’. I used to have that after every ride. Again, it doesn’t seem a big enough change to have caused such a dip. Maybe I’m clutching at straws.
Weirdly the overall trend doesn’t seem to be as bad as I initially thought. Maybe a second wind will come and I’ll suddenly gain 20 watts. Come on wishful thinking!
Right so yeah, basically the same again for the week ahead. The only difference this week is that I’m away on Wednesday with work. So I’ve re-arranged my days so that Monday is SST, Tuesday will be the Tour of Watopia Standard, then race Thursday, and Longer Stage 2 on Saturday.
Basically, business as usual. Just different days.