Late to the party, I am doing the Zwift Academy Road 2022 group rides and workouts out of order. The key thing is to get both the two mandatory group rides (Baseline and Finish Line) done by this Sunday when ZA2022 officially ends. Technically I think it ends at 9am on the Monday, but whatever.
I already did Workout #1 on Sunday.
So I think it’s best to call out that I don’t expect to see any meaningful improvement in between now, doing some workouts, and then doing the Finish Line ride. That seems… hugely optimistic.
But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to give each ride my best.
Today’s ride, the Baseline, was all about establishing three painful markers. A short, medium, and ‘long’ effort, which I was assured would be used to figure out my “rider phenotype”, that they would then email me about. Welp, no email, and none the wiser on just how pheno I am. But if I had to guess, I’d say I’m probably in the p’he-no-good category.
Certainly I don’t expect to be making the cut for the pro contract 🙂 Even during this ride I could just imagine that Data Scientists at Zwift exporting all the ride data out into a huge Excel spreadsheet. I’d be dropped the moment they applied the first filter, no doubt about it.
So yeah, this one is three efforts.
Pre-ride they were coy about what these efforts would be, so it was left to the event itself to spell them out.
But alas, I hit on a technical hitch today. I was on the bike and ready to go with less than a minute to spare. By the time I got in game, the event had just started, and as there was only ~35 attendees I had fairly few back markers to chase.
The on-screen messaging assured me today’s event was not a race. However, as we all know, all events on Zwift are races.
Then it started telling me about what was ahead. All good. I was busy snapping screenshots when I thought hey, now’s the time to put the fan on.
So I opened up my Tapu app, tapped the fan, and … nothing.
After a bit of mucking about I decided the fan must be suffering from the continued WiFi antics that seem to be plaguing my home at the moment. So off I got, as quick as I could, pulled out the plug, plugged it back in, got back on the bike, started going again … and nothing.
Boo.
Well, after pressing the phone screen harder (which didn’t work, but felt like it might), I had to get off yet again and then I noticed someone had turned the fan off entirely. So no wonder it wasn’t working. I want to blame my kids, but I suspect it was an accident somehow. Anyway, problem solved, I could get back on and carry on with the warm up.
Only by now I’d missed all the prompts telling me what the heck to expect. As such I was basically riding blind.
And then BAM, right into the first effort.
Well, I completely misjudged this one. As you can see from the graph, I rather ambitiously tried to hold about 450w for two minutes. Without much of a warm up I stood no chance of that, and the last 30 seconds really tapered off. Annoyingly I crawled over the line.
Still, according to Strava this was a new PB on that segment.
But that does mean I have something to aim for on my Finish Line ride. Pace that a little better.
The recovery between efforts today was massive.
I still struggled to get the heart rate below 150 bpm, but yeah, this was not an FTP test kinda thing.
The next effort was over 10km later. Now, I know Zwift speeds etc, but that was still a 20 minute recovery between efforts. Pretty wild.
That second effort was the 300m sprint.
I gave this one the absolute beans, and I whilst I definitely petered out towards the end, I managed to set a new PB and a new max heart rate of 201bpm… haha, call the doctor, please.
Truthfully I don’t know whether I felt worse after the first or second efforts, but the second one definitely felt like I’d performed a little better.
The recovery time to the third effort was only 8 minutes. Not sure what the thinking was there.
For the third effort we were heading up the Volcano KOM.
My plan for this one was to sit at FTP / 245w. I did alright on this for the first 5 minutes, but then I really flagged.
In my mind I was thinking: how can I be doing so bad at FTP, falling off the pace after 5 minutes when I’ve done so well with this recently?
But I guess the difference today was that on my previous FTP efforts I’ve only done the 20 minute steady state ride. I’ve not done two max efforts prior. Maybe if I had, the 20 minute test would be a different story.
Anyway, I finished this one off today with an out of the saddle effort to get me to the arch. I’m not sure how that fits into the whole estimation of potential or whatever, because I know you’re not supposed to do that in an FTP test. But the on screen prompts suggested this was OK, so I took them up on it.
I was glad to get this one done with, I have to admit. I tried hard in all three, but feel I could see the most improvement in the first and third efforts. I don’t anticipate being able to shave much off the first effort, but I reckon I could get a couple of seconds off the Volcano climb.
And that was that.
Unfortunately at the very end my Zwift Companion App seemed to go TU and stop taking screenshots, so I don’t have the very end data to show. But I’m sure both you and I can live with that.
So now it’s a case of doing the remaining workouts that I can fit in. I don’t anticipate being able to finish them all before Sunday, but I will finish them all for sure.
