For this evening’s ride I continued with my pre-planned schedule which meant doing 45 minutes of rider’s choice. Okay, it was supposed to be 60 minutes, but I can over rule myself.
You may, or may not, have seen that today, Zwift launched a beta version of their steering / mountain bike course.
As you can therefore imagine, the London course was really rather quiet.
My goal for this ride was fairly simple:
Do several blocks of 5 minute (or greater) efforts at a steady cadence.
And by and large, I achieved this.
With a fairly brisk warm up, I went perhaps too hard, too soon in my first block.
I wasn’t aiming for a particular wattage, but rather a particular cadence.
In the first “on” block I went for 95rpm in (what I thought) a fairly easy gear. As you may know, I am fairly clueless about the technicals of bikes, so what I can tell you is it was 4 rings down from the big ring at the back.
At ~95rpm this put me at about 235w, which I kept up for 5 minutes.
After which I was puffing, dripping, and panting like a dog at the sea side.
For whatever reason, I know not why, I decided that 2 minutes of rest (130w) was sufficient, and then I’d get back into 95rpm in the third gear down from the top.
This equated to about 185w, which I kept up for about 8 minutes all in, as best I recall.
I repeated this twice. On the second block my cadence was more like 90rpm average as best I recall.
By the time of the final block I was pretty bushed. The high cadence work was over, so I decided to finish off with a lower gear at a lower cadence. More like 75rpm.
This felt like a solid workout, and with only few, and short rest intervals, it was pretty taxing on the legs.
Again, in accordance with my grand plan, tomorrow is a rest day.
All being well, Friday will be race day. Not sure what yet. I will likely leave that until Friday morning (or tomorrow evening) to decide upon.
What I’d really like to do is try and put two of the hard 5 minute @ 95rpm intervals together, and see just how much distance I can cover in that time period. As best my dubious maths told me, I managed around 4km in 5 minutes in… that seems really fast to me, so I’m doubting myself massively.
Happy to get another ~27km off the weekly goal.
All being well I should reach the 100km Zwift riding goal, but already for the week I am at 96.6km including RGT Cycling. Good times.
For a workout that wasn’t structured, I am really pleased with how the graph turned out.
I made a plan, and I stuck to it. I’d be a little happier if the two middle blocks were fairly flat instead of rising up as time went by. Still lots of work to do.
This ride felt pretty intense. Particularly the 5 minute initial interval. I was really kinda hoping to beat my previous time… I came close, but not close enough.
There’s always another day.
