Right then.
The late summer heatwave is upon us. 28c outside. What better weather to stay indoors and do the first Zwift Academy 2021 workout? 🙂
Here’s the spiel for ride 1:
If you’ve been struggling to stay with your local group ride during climbs, this is the perfect session to develop the fitness needed to keep up. This session is all about building the duration of time spent riding at an effort level close to your VO2 Max, which we’ll explain.
When exercising, your heart and lungs work hard to pump oxygenated red blood cells in your body to your muscle tissue. The more oxygen your body can use, the more your muscles can work. VO2 Max is the maximum amount of oxygen your body can use. Improving it enables you to increase the time spent at moderate or high intensity.
Here’s how we’ll do just that. First we spike the effort at the start of each interval, then balance that intensity to maintain high oxygen consumption without getting you exhausted too early. This is a solid workout that you can rely on any time.
Coach’s Tip: Zwift Academy Road was developed with structure in mind. For best results, complete the workouts in order.
This training program was designed by Stephen Gallagher and Dan Fleeman from Dig Deep Coaching. Their complete coaching approach ensures every Zwift Academy athlete learns the building blocks for successful training.
Zwift Academy Road: Workout 1 | VO2 Over/Unders
Taking a look at the workout graph ahead of this ride, along with the rest of the ZA2021 Road rides, I reckoned it would be easier than previous years.
Not rightly sure why this might be? And I have been known to be quite wrong with these over estimations of my ability on previous occasions 🙂
But anyway, I was going into this one expecting that 2 minute @ 270w / 115% FTP being nasty, particularly on the second and third intervals, and then I figured the under blocks wouldn’t be too bad.
How did I get on? Let’s carry on and see.
When you factor in the warm up, the cool down, and the gaps in between the intervals, the hard work today only lasted for 18 minutes.
That’s not too bad, really.
Take a Short SST session as a comparison, and you’re working for 40 minutes there. Now, whilst that’s all under FTP, I reckon that’s still harder than this workout.
The advice given on screen ahead of the first 2 minute block was to keep a higher cadence than you would be using for the under blocks.
My preferred cadence for Zwift workouts is 95rpm, so 100rpm seemed a suitable target to aim for in the over blocks.
I can’t remember if the on screen advice suggested 100rpm… I think it suggested just going higher than you would usually ride. There was definitely no RPM targets for the intervals. Just wattage targets.
It seems that this years pithy slogan is “Get After It!”.
This was repeated, I think, at the end of each block. These slogans don’t work for me. Maybe others find them motivating. Whatever. It’s just words, I’m not getting hung up on their use.
Having done the first block, I was nice and sweaty. The over blocks were not to be sniffed at, but I found the under blocks “easy” enough to recover at.
What I would definitely say is all the outdoor activity where I tend to aim for 3.2w/kg when at a ‘normal’-ish pace have had to help in some way or another.
Mainly I focused on getting my heart rate under control during the under blocks, and that went well enough – the lower RPM and the lighter load. Even so, I don’t think I managed to get significantly down on any of the blocks before having to go over once more.
Where I think I did OK today was in the 6 minute recovery blocks.
Honestly, 6 minutes between was probably on the long side.
By 3 minutes in my heart rate had dropped for ~180s back to ~130, so for the following 3 minutes I was pootling along and ready to get back on it. How I might have fared with only 3 minute breathers is a different story altogether, but I can massage my ego a little here and pretend I am better than I am.
Right?
It’s a pity I didn’t get to do this one with the big group ride. I’m not sure what route they picked for this one, so I did it on whatever Zwift gave as my route by default on Watopia.
At 49 minutes this was also a slightly short workout. No bad thing – managed to slip this one in on my dinner hour.
Would I have gone out today? Yeah… probably.
Would it have been a good idea? No, probably not.
It’s baking out there. And whilst I sweated my backside off indoors, it was probably the more sensible thing to stay indoors and regulate my riding.
All in all, a decent first day of the week on the bike. Slightly down on distance – ideally would have liked to hit 30km – but enjoyed the variation of riding all the same. I’m looking forward to the next workout, which seems pretty similar, but I should get to do that with the group.
One thing is I need to fit that in as a week day ride, and the mini heatwave is due to continue for a few more days. So I might head outdoors as a bit of a break / recovery tomorrow, and then do the Zwift ride on Thursday.
