Weekly Review October 5th – 11th 2020

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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 only consisted of 5 days riding, with one ride being indoors, and the other four being outdoor rides. I had a week off work so managed to get in nearly 8 hours on the bike, covering over 200km.

This week’s rides were as follows:

The two rides from this week that I will remember the most were the first two of the week.

I love that my bike has given me the freedom to explore. Up until this year I hadn’t been back to the Trough of Bowland since I was a little kid. I have mostly great memories of the Trough – the one sour memory being stung by an angry wasp that had decided to take residence in my shoe, and which then stung me on the foot when I went to put said shoe on. In the wasps defence, I can see why it would have done that.

Without my bike, would I have ever gone back to the Trough, though?

Maybe. Now that I have kids of my own, maybe I would have – one day – thought, heck, you know what? Let’s go to the other side of those two great big hills and see what’s happening.

Or maybe not.

But with the bike, I actively seek out these new (or old) memories and go exploring. And I’m so glad I can, and do.

Monday morning, sun shining, roads super quiet, my God it was blissful. I really, really enjoyed that ride. 770m of climb? That was definitely taxing. But 3 hours out on my own, in stunning countryside, with great weather (for the time of year, anyway). I couldn’t have asked for a better start to the week.

And then I took a rest day on Tuesday, and on Wednesday followed the Trough ride with my first Zwift Academy 2020 ride.

Sadly, that one wasn’t without its fair share of typical Zwift issues. I wanted to do it as a group workout, but alas, for several reasons that just didn’t work out. I guess with Zwift, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

Fortunately, I did know enough about working around Zwift issues that I could tackle the workout solo. It was frustrating to see the chat of the group riders who were doing the workout at the same time as me, but in some small way that did help bring some kind of atmosphere to the ride.

And in many ways I miss those structured workouts.

Riding outdoors is great. Really great. But it’s a solo affair – always. I have no riding buddies, sadly. And outdoors I do my own thing. Sometimes I push myself, but most of the time I don’t. I feel that’s to my detriment.

But I am resolved to get in as many outdoor rides as I can before the weather eventually goes so south that I only have the indoor option available.

I’m looking forwards to completing the remainder of these workouts, and doing at least one – hopefully more – races, and getting a couple of the Zwift Academy group rides in along the way. Following the 8 week structure basically takes me up to December which makes the Zwift Academy my own X-Factor, or Strictly Come Dancing. It’s the thing I do that leads me up to Christmas. Or my Birthday, anyway.

The rest of the rides of the week were largely forgettable affairs. By Wednesday night I’d pretty much hit my 100km weekly riding goal, and so let myself off working too hard for the rest of the week.

I wanted to get in another longer ride later in the week, but the weather didn’t really give me too many choices. Thursday saw a comparatively longer ride, but it was so heavy with busy road traffic that it was hard to really enjoy it. Also, the wind. My word. The wind. I think that’s the windiest ride I’ve ever done. Headwinds in both directions. How is that even possible?!

In other cycling related news this week, I bought some new stuff.

Some of these bits were for indoor only use, and others for outdoors.

All of these things came already – not sure why the last one is showing as “expected”. It’s here, and I’ve worn it twice already.

Starting from the top, the TP-Link Tapo Smart Plug at just 9 quid felt like a no brainer.

One of my big whinging points is having to either turn on the fan before I’ve started pedalling – then get on the bike. This makes me all cold to begin with. But if I don’t start the fan, I either have to shout for my wife / kids to come and do it for me (not always possible), or worse, start, the stop, get off the bike, turn on the fan, then get back on, clip in, and resume the workout.

For nine quid, having the ability to “OK Google, can we start the fans, please!” seemed like such a simple solution that I could no longer resist. And yes, it works perfectly, even on a 4 way extension. I can’t control the fan speed – but I can remotely / hands free turn on my fan. Win.

The head band was another absolute revelation.

Someone on Reddit’s Zwift subreddit recommend headbands as something they couldn’t live without. I sweat like … well, like a sweaty man. I sweat a lot from my head, and by the end of most rides my towel looks like someone has used it to mop up a leisure centre changing room floor after a school swimming session.

I’ve only used the headband on one ride – my indoor Zwift Academy ride this week – but it worked really, really well. My towel wasn’t dry, but it was significantly drier than usual. Highly recommended if you find yourself frequently brow mopping.

More to help with the mess made from outdoor rides, the Park Tool bike cleaning brush set has seen two uses at this point.

I mainly bought this set for the cassette cleaning brush. For the price, for that one brush, this is steep. Up until now I’d just been using an old kitchen sponge to clean my bike. It sounds poor, but it did a fairly decent job.

However, my cassette was absolutely disgraceful. So, combined with some WD-40 degreaser I’d ordered a while back, I managed to get a sparkling cassette with very minimal effort.

I have used the other three brushes today and they did a decent enough job. No better than the kitchen sponge and a bit of elbow grease though.

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On my more recent rides I’ve found myself using my arm warmers more and more frequently. Nothing wrong with that. It does give me the option to remove them if I get too hot. But lately I’m not getting too hot. So I figured I should get a long sleeve base layer and have two less things to wash after each ride.

I have another base layer from Sub Sports. They are tight fit, no doubt about it. Harder to get on that take off, strangely.

This top is great. The cuffs are a bit short, but under a jacket they are fine.

Other long sleeve base layers were available, but I bought this one for two reasons. The first being that I know Sub Sports, but the other was simply that this was one of the cheaper choices. Many other options came in well over twenty quid. I figured I’d take a shot on this one – not sure if it was free returns on Amazon Prime. Thankfully didn’t need to find out.

Week Ahead

As of tomorrow I’m on a new contract, which probably means a fairly stressful week ahead. It’s a short term deal, so that usually makes it even more stressful. Tight deadlines.

Not sure how much riding I will get in this week. Outdoors? Probably not so much. Maybe just Sunday, if I’m lucky.

I’m aiming to do the next Zwift Academy workout, ideally one of the group rides, and potentially an SST session to boot.

I need to cut back on eating so much crap as well. Been bad for that this week. No more junk. At least, for a while.

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