A little late to the party, but I decided to see if I can complete the Zwift Academy Road 2022 series within the next 8 days.
I believe I have to complete six workouts and two group rides.
As best I am aware, the two group rides are the Baseline & Finish Line rides. The 6 workouts can be done standalone, but must be done by 10th October. That gives me a week.
I’m aiming to do all the longer workouts. Having just done this one today, that means I have 5 remaining, along with the two group rides… so a bit of a packed schedule.
However it does mean I have a set routine to follow, which is always nice. And there’s a variety of workouts so the only two days that are going to be ‘the same’ are the Baseline & Finish Line rides.
I hit on a technical issue today when starting the ride. Basically the companion app wasn’t switching to ‘game’ mode. As such I don’t have the ride intro screenshots. However, I fixed this quite easily by alt+tabbing out of Zwift, disconnecting the WiFi, then reconnecting. After that I was good.
In terms of overall workout I wasn’t expecting this one to be a killer. However, as with all these Zwift workouts this one was a little deceptive. The difficulty for me isn’t hitting the targets, but rather remaining consistent over the duration.
This one was as follows:
However, I enjoyed this workout. It wasn’t so taxing as to make me need a proper rest between, yet it still came in at a decent calorie burn. So I’m hoping the remaining five are similar in intensity. And to be fair, the way the Academy series has been trending (downwards in difficult since I started in 2019, in my opinion) I expect that to be the case.
Zwift definitely seems busier / more active since I left. I know during the height of the pandemic we were seeing >10k actives, but now even on a Sunday morning there was a good ~2,200 just on Makuri Islands. It’s nice to see things trending in the right direction for the platform.
I guess with 5 workouts to go, I am going to be on for a busy week. How I structure this, I don’t know. It may be that I have to do two shorter workouts in one day, rather than all the long ones. I wouldn’t mind doing all the longer efforts, but I have a job and a life to squeeze in there somewhere.
Fun times.
Yep, I’ve done 5 of the workouts and this is the easiest ZA to date.
PS. When you wake up Friday morning, it will be my Friday night 😊
haha 😀
It’s when I check Strava and you’re there cycling to work at 4.45am Monday and I’m still sat watching Sunday night TV that just fries my mind. Although tbf, doing anything other than sleeping at 4.45am is unacceptable in my eyes.
Have to say though, maxing out on that first Baseline effort, up the Titan’s Grove reverse KOM, that did not feel like the easiest ZA at the time. That was very much a want to puke afterwards kind of feeling.
Yeah, main reason for early rise is nice quiet streets, plus start/finish work early.
I enjoyed the baseline ride, might not enjoy the finish line ride so much. I’ll have to flog myself to prove to myself I didn’t waste my time on those workouts.