My three rides so far this week have all been fairly full on. Ok, Monday‘s was a little on the short side, but it was hard enough getting back on the bike after a holiday.
Tuesday was Emily’s Short Mix with a bit extra, and yesterday I did Zwift Academy 2019 Workout #5 – 1 minute power duration.
By rights, today was supposed to be an easy day.
I had in mind a bunch of blue blocks. What’s that – zone 2? I never know the right name for these things.
But when I got on the bike and looked at the FTP Builder program, I saw a couple of blue rides and they both looked fairly long… and fairly dull.
So I opted for largely blue, but with each block proceeded by a minute at 190w, followed by 4 minutes at 130w, repeated 4x.
After the first block of intervals there would be a 10 minute recovery section at 100w, and then the same again until finished.
As ever, cadence was probably my biggest weakness on this ride.
Spinning above 100rpm seems to really screw up the Tacx Neo2. I don’t really understand why, but the sweet spot is most definitely between 75-95rpm. Anything below and it becomes far too intense, and anything about and I’m bouncing about all over the shop.
What I aimed to do on this ride… after a bit of a bodged start, was to keep spinning at or around 95rpm and let the Neo figure it out whenever I switched between blocks.
This turned out to work really well, though required a little practice on my part. It’s very easy to change cadence between blocks, which as above, seems to throw the Neo off.
Much like many of the other FTP Builder workouts, this wasn’t a particularly interesting ride. I opted for Watopia Flat circuit, simply to smash out the kilometers.
In the end I did about 30km.
I also near as dammit hit the weekly 3 hour riding goal – but not quite. Not entirely sure how many minutes or seconds I am away from that, but it’s very close.
Not bad for Wednesday.
I had planned to take tomorrow as a rest day. I still do.
I had planned to ride a Zwift Academy race on Friday. That’s now looking very unlikely. I have a prior family commitment on Friday evening that i cannot reschedule, and that means I can either do the race on Saturday … or miss out till next week.
I’m not sure what to do just yet. I need to check the schedule a little more. The race I had in mind was the Volcano After Party race – it’s 40km. That, I reckon will take at least an hour. It would be pretty full on. It re-runs twice on Saturday as best I can tell, but it doesn’t appear to run again on Sunday. I wish I had a free-r schedule as my timings and Zwift’s timings are often in conflict.
Finishing up the workout today, I opted to continue on – just for a touch. The workout ended around 29km, so I wanted to push on to at least 30km. Where I finished up I was on the run in to Watopia down town, so I worked to the arch and then called it a day.
488 calories – happy with that.
I have to say, the final two yellow blocks in this one were definitely felt in the legs. I’m looking forwards to having a day off the bike.
All in all, a really positive start to the week this week.
Hopefully I can get something done on Friday. No major worries if not. I’m well on my way to meeting the 100km riding distance goal this week at 78.2km ridden.
