I probably wouldn’t have done a run today had it not been for the Zwift Running 101 plan telling me my “best 1 mile run” workout was about to expire. Not getting to run. That would have been a shame.
Though to be fair that’s exactly why I am using the training plan. There’s no way I’d be doing this without the structure.
Therefore I cut my work morning short and at half ten, donned my training top, shorts and runpod and got on the treadmill.
What I will say it’s considerably more difficult to use either the companion app or the iPad touch screen when running compared to cycling.
And this is important as during the run the on screen prompt suggested setting a goal. This involved clicking a circle in the top left and then trying to read the various choices, and press on one and confirm, all whilst the run continues in the background.
The initial warm up is still a bit messed up for me. I tried to change my pacing this morning before the run, but that wanted me to recalibrate and I didn’t fancy doing that.
Instead I decided to ignore the suggested speeds and use the treadmill speed option to put my on screen graph in the colour band showed on the left workout breakdown.
This worked fairly well.
What I was definitely supposed to do today was to keep running (or jogging) between the hard blocks in the first set of intervals.
I didn’t do this.
I decided to walk instead.
With a mile effort coming up, this smacked of the FTP test warm up. In my opinion doing a bunch of hard efforts before jumping into a hard effort is not a good move for me.
For me, I prefer a lighter warm up and then going harder in the effort that matters. Maybe I’m wrong. I very well could be. But mentally at least, this works best for me.
For the mile effort I went at 11.5kph on the treadmill.
This didn’t correlate to what I saw in Zwift. In Zwift I was reported as going slower.
I paced myself by nudging up the treadmill speed until I was just in the red.
Perhaps I could have gone a couple of points of a kph faster, but I’m happy enough with the pace I set in the effort.
With 200m left to go I was able to up my speed. In many ways this is easier on the treadmill than in an FTP test as its just a button push rather than actively having to find something in your legs / body to ramp up the pace.
And of course this wasn’t a 20 minute max effort either. But knowing I had something left to give at the end does give some indication that I left something in the tank.
As soon as the mile was done I was bang down to a walking pace.
This, again, is not Zwift recommended. But I was shot.
And also it felt like I had a blister forming on my right heel. I was happy enough with the workout but I was definitely glad it was over.
After the run I didn’t want to get back to my desk to resume the job hunt.
So instead I carried on, setting up the bike and getting in a solid hour recovery session to spin out the legs and get back in my comfort zone.
I’ve seen others doing 5k runs on Strava and I know the pace I set today was below what I’ve seen from others. And this was only 1.6km.
Much like with my early days cycling it’s very hard to think about how I could comfortably run 5k at a decent clip at this point. But with persistence, it will no doubt come.
Switching over from running to cycling did put Zwift in a total state.
Even though I’d done my run on the iPad, switching to the PC kept showing me the running training plan when trying to select the FTP Builder session I had in mind.
Classic Zwift bugs.
I definitely need to calibrate the treadmill again.
Now that I know a little more about what I’m doing, I know to ease things back a touch. Maybe by a single KPH to begin with and see how I get on.
If I’d expected the recovery ride to be any less sweaty than the run then I was sorely mistaken.
In terms of calories burned, at least what is reported by Strava, cycling definitely seems to have a slight edge on running. Not sure why that is.
I find cycling vastly easier, too. Although maybe that’s just completely biased at this point.
Not sure what lies in store for tomorrow. If it’s a nice day, I wouldn’t mind getting out on the open roads.
But today it absolutely lashed it down, so I suspect we aren’t yet done with the thunder.
