Zwift Academy 2023 – Workout #5: Long | Steady State

I’m off today as it’s my birthday and I didn’t fancy a repeat of my horrendous 40th birthday last year. That one sucked so bad I’ve decided to never work my birthday again.

What that meant is I’ve basically done nothing all day. Just had a guilt free day off.

It also does mean I’m back in the office tomorrow, and by office I mean travelling to Sheffield, so a 12+ hour day awaits. Deep joy.

I had the choice of things to do today.

This week I have a small itinerary of rides to tick off. There was this one, and the Zwift Academy Race #1, along with the new ZRacing series Race #1 for December.

A race would have been shorter, that’s for sure.

But would it have been easier?

The challenge with The Steady State workout is the duration.

Two thirty minute intervals, one in ERG and one free-ride.

I wasn’t sure whether the target would be to try and beat the first one in the second one. But that isn’t the case.

The idea is you repeat the first one, only you control the power in the second one.

Unfortunately I had app issues during the opening part of this ride, so I didn’t get the screenshots explaining that. Fortunately I did manage to catch it though.

Anyway, the first effort isn’t that bad.

It’s just long.

Like a very long lower intensity block in a Sweet Spot Training session.

The one downer, of course, is that you know you have to do it all again after a really meagre five minute recovery block.

The second interval is, of course, harder.

It’s intended that you hit the same target…

But try doing that without ERG mode. You basically get whatever you get, according to cadence, gear, and trainer resistance setting.

For me, I sat pretty much at 95rpm for the second block. Ideally this would have been 90rpm, but as above, the issue was the power figures best matched the previous effort at 95rpm, and dropping or raising a gear couldn’t noticeably alter that.

This basically meant I was targeting cadence for the whole interval. And after about 25 minutes, hitting that steady 95rpm was a real chore.

I ended up putting out 234w average, which is about where my FTP is at right now. All things considered, I was pretty happy with that. But it was a good chunk higher than what I believe I was supposed to be doing for the interval.

Anyway, I came off suitably thrashed.

I had planned to go out for a walk after, but where I wanted to go is apparently a bit of a bog right now so I skipped it. Maybe I’ll do that walk at the weekend. It’s a drive out and then a walk. Probably won’t change much though, as the weather isn’t favourable.

So that’s one of two ZA rides done for this week. Nothing doing tomorrow, but I’ll aim to get my regular ZRacing race done Thursday. Possibly be absolutely bushed from a long drive, but then I always get creamed anyway.

I’d rather do the ZA race on Saturday when I suspect the crowd will be bigger. I’ve never done a ‘big’ race, so I’m quite keen to give that a shot.