Year Review 2019

2019 has been a fantastic year for me. It’s my first year on a bike since I was about 14 I think, so well over half a life time ago.

I’ve achieved a lot in the 9 months I’ve been riding, and I am greatly looking forwards to getting the full 12 months in for 2020.

Here are my highlights:

Bought A Bike (and all the other bits)

First and foremost: I got off my lazy arse, bought a bike, and got started actively improving my health and fitness.

This alone is the single greatest win for me, probably of the entire decade.

Far too long had I been sedentary. Sat in front of a computer, eating crap, drinking too much, and poisoning my body in other ways (gave up the smoking earlier in the decade).

It feels like more than a year ago that I was sat in the Lake District watching GCN on YouTube, thinking: I am going to buy a bike and get on this Zwift thing!

When I got back that week, I bought all the stuff I needed to get online and start my cycling journey. It wasn’t easy. And it wasn’t cheap. But it has been so worth it I’d have paid 10x or more if I’d needed too.

Completed The Tour Of Watopia 2019

Imagine going from being a sloth sat at a desk to jumping out of bed early on a Sunday morning just to take part in an online cycling game. It sounds like madness, but that was my first true experience of Zwift: The Tour of Watopia 2019.

I was both nervous and excited to jump into this event. Would I be able to finish it? Would I finish last? How did any of it even work?

Well, fortunately, aside from myriad technical hurdles (as in, with my bike setup), the ride experiences were brilliant. Having never seen hardly any of Watopia before, riding each stage with 800+ other people each week was absolutely brilliant.

The culmination of the Tour of Watopia 2019 was my first trip up Alpe Du Zwift. I was absolutely bricking it, but the previous 6 weeks had given me a noticeable uptick in fitness that helped me reach the top. Who cares about the time (1h 58m), I was elated / exhausted in equal measures when I hit the summit. Brilliant.

Interested in taking part in 2020? First up is Tour De Zwift.

My First (And Second) FTP Tests

The thing is, my first FTP test was ridiculous. It has to be the closest I’ve ever come to having a heart attack / out of body experience.

The best way to describe this was like doing the high school bleep test, only with a PE teacher who wouldn’t let you quit for 20 solid minutes, and the whole thing being run at the same ridiculous intensity level rather than building and building. So in many ways, nothing like the bleep test. But I have bad memories of that bleep test, so it’s no surprises that’s how I mentally frame the FTP test.

It was so unnerving an experience I put off doing my second FTP test for another 6 months.

As scary as it was, establishing my baseline fitness (rather than going off Zwift’s guesstimated FTP figure) was an incredibly useful metric to have available to me.

During the run up to the first test I’d had so many bike problems that when I finally got them fixed I felt an incredible amount of relief. A huge shout out to MB Cycle Repair who were absolutely fantastic in every regard. Highly, highly recommended.

Racing To Win

Online competitive multiplayer is something I absolutely love. I’m one of those people who must be the best they can be at any game they try. This doesn’t mean I’m a toxic ass-hat (goodbye Overwatch!), but rather that if I’m playing, I am playing to win.

Now, I’m fully aware I will almost certainly never win a Zwift race. There’s a variety of reasons for this, chief amongst them that Zwift racing is (currently) broken in so much as the category winners have never yet been correctly categorised (imho).

Anyway, whinging aside, the best aspect of Zwift for me has been racing.

I tried to pick out my favourite race of the year, but honestly, I’ve enjoyed them all.

Having my kids being there at my side with their signs, cheering me on…. blissfully unaware daddy is rocking 44th of 77 riders 😀 Good times. And an amazing workout.

Cycling On Holiday

It was on holiday (in the Lake District, as above) that I resolved to get a bike and get on Zwift.

Later on in the year I was away in Tenerife and, for the first time (ever?), I took my cycling stuff and hit the gym.

Whilst I didn’t go every day, even getting in a couple of sessions during my holiday was helpful in terms of cutting down on some of the over eating (and especially the over drinking), and also keeping up the routine.

I’d say making a routine – riding 5 times a week, aiming for 100km a week, ride for 3 hours or more each week – all of that has been incredibly helpful in forming good habits, and more importantly, sticking to them.

Zwift Academy 2019

Aside from the Tour of Watopia, I took part in a number of other smaller events on Zwift this year. The only one comparable in terms of participants and length of the series would be Zwift Academy 2019.

There were a number of really challenging work outs in the Zwift Academy 2019 series. Some of them pushed me to my limit, and also helped me better understand my limits and how to break through them.

In particular I found the on screen ride instructor prompts to be very informative, and I have continued to incorporate bits and pieces I learned during these several hard weeks into my training ever since.

One thing I found frustrating about the Zwift Academy 2019 rides was the lack of suitable time slots to take part in the group events. This wasn’t a show stopper – I could run each workout individually from the menu – but I definitely missed out on the social aspect by doing so much of this series as solo rides.

Sunday Climbs

What started as a way to build my fitness in order to meet / exceed my year long FTP goal (more on that in a moment) became something of a new experience for me that I’m really glad I discovered.

The idea was to put in a hard climb – ideally of 1000m or greater – each Sunday. The theory here being that it would be a solid workout, and could only help build my muscles, stamina, and all that good stuff.

When I originally purchased my Tacx Neo 2 I got a free (as in completely paid for as part of the eye watering up front cost of the trainer) 30 day trial membership to Tacx Software’s premium service.

I’m yet to do a full review of this software, but the gist of it is a cycling simulator that uses videos of real world rides, rather than the Zwift style computer generated graphics approach. There are pros and cons to this, but the major pro for me is that there’s a huge range of mountains to tackle.

I’m slowly working my way through these climbs (and up those hills) and give a huge amount of credit to doing this each most weekends that helped me in ultimately…

Beating My FTP Goal

Aside from getting the bike (and all the associated tackle) that I needed to start riding indoors, having a set goal / goals was a big motivating factor in keeping me coming back to the bike 5 times a week.

Originally I set out on my journey around Watopia / Zwift’s other worlds simply exploring, and in the process, Zwift assigned me an FTP figure.

It was low.

I found a less flattering chart somewhere which basically said I was as weak as a pint of festival lager. And not a beer festival. I’m talking about one of those ice cream van beers served in a plastic cup that’s hot, lacking fizz, and diluted ten to one.

Yes, I was a incredibly unfit. I really wish I’d blogged my first two rides on Zwift. Unfortunately, for several reasons, I did not. The main point of hilarity was for my first several rides my bike wasn’t even properly secured to the trainer. Actually, that’s just the tip of the ice berg. I had no clue what I was doing. I’d never heard of an FTP… well, I tell a lie. I had. To me, FTP meant File Transfer Protocol.

Anyway, I still can’t read that chart properly but what I do know is I fairly quickly decided I wanted to end the year 2019 with an FTP of 200w or greater.

It took a lot of rides and a concerted effort, but finally hitting the figure of 206w just a couple of week’s ago (at the time of writing) was the most satisfying thing I have yet achieved in my time as a reborn cyclist.

Hard work pays off.

I need to set a new goal for 2020, and right now I’m considering aiming for 230w. No idea how realistic that is, but I have a set of workouts and exercises to take me towards that goal, so let’s see how far I can get.

Blogging

There’s been a few things that have kept me coming back to the bike:

• Zwift is awesome;
• The high initial up front cost made me feel deeply invested (in several ways!);
• The other cycling software I have tried has been fun and interesting;
• Competitions / races / group rides;
• Cycling is something I have found I really enjoy

But aside from all of that (and many other reasons), one of the biggest reasons I have kept coming back is this blog.

At the end of each ride I make notes of what I’ve done. I reflect on how the ride went, what went well and what I could have done better. That process has led me to all kinds of discoveries and insights, and sharing those with you has been a big part of this for me.

Being completely honest, there have been several times over the past 9 months where I have not wanted to get on the bike. But the thought of me suddenly stopping updates to this blog makes me come back. I am not a quitter. Not at cycling, and not at anything else I believe in.

Talking with other cyclists about all of this stuff has been amazing. For a sport I consider kinda solitary (which to me is a good thing!) I have found myself really enjoying the social aspects of cycling way more than I expected too.

Looking Forward To 2020

Those are just some of my highlights. I didn’t mention the 20 minutes to 10km goal that I obsessed over for a while. Or the first time I did a 50km ride. Or things like smashing previous PBs, grabbing a jersey (yes, it happened, twice!), or upgrading from my original iPad setup to a big TV and dedicated gaming PC.

For me 2020 is exciting for many reasons, but most of all because I want to get out on the open road in the real world and use all my indoor training to explore the outdoors.

There’s a bunch of routes I want to explore in the nearby fells, all around the Ribble Valley, and also some of the structured rides like Manchester to Blackpool. I still plan to blog these rides, so new kit will need to be purchased. I have no idea if a Go Pro or whatever can record in full HD for that length of time, but these are the new challenges that await me.

As above, I want to keep pushing my fitness and aim for a new FTP goal, likely 230w or greater by the end of the year.

Thank You

Thank you very much for reading my blog in 2019.

Thank you if you have left a comment, sent me a message, helped me in any way at all. You all know who you are, but I would never share your names publicly!

I wish you a very happy New Year, and hope you have a fantastic 2020.

See you on the other side.