At 38 minutes, this one was short enough to feel a little on the “light” side before setting off, whilst hard enough to come off the bike feeling like I’d done a decent effort.
The work today came in two ten minute blocks.
The second slightly easier than the first, but not by much.
What’s nice about these officially organised Zwift Spring Training series rides are that they tend to attract a good number of people. There were 130 on for today’s session, which is a good number for a Wednesday lunch break. Even more so when, I believe, these rides run every hour.
I think, being a group workout, that these rides are rubber banded. Which means the front of the group is pulled back, and the back of the group sped up, so as to keep the bunch together.
That does mean you won’t rack up a huge amount of virtual kilometres doing one of these rides.
But that’s not the point.
The point is the workout. And this one delivered.
What was most interesting about this workout was how relatively easy those 230w / 1m 45s blocks felt after the 370w / 15 second bursts. They were hard, hard work.
Fortunately, in the second repeat, these 15 second bursts dropped to 350w.
I’m honestly not sure I could have done more than three repeats of this. Two was plenty. Three would have pushed me. Four, I think, would have been too much.
As hard as this session was, it never felt unachievable. That’s something. I wasn’t exactly mentally nor physically at my peak going into this one, but being fairly short I think that helped me get through it.
The other thing was that with the 8 minute warm up, that first block felt challenging.
But after a 6 minute recovery between the first and second blocks, and with fully primed legs, the second block definitely felt easier. At least, initially.
Each time the 15 second bursts came round, they were definitely taxing.
Still, I guess that’s the point.
Also, one other thing of note today was how much the on-screen prompting focused on the summer outdoor rides. I thought that unusual, in that Zwift would surely like to keep you subscribed and I know a lot of people do unsubscribe for summer. It seemed unusual for them to promote the outdoor stuff, that’s the first time I’ve seen it.
Oh, and another thing. Today was actually quite sunny outdoors. Sunny, but not warm.
I believe tomorrow is going to be dull, and potentially rainy.
So I may well have thrown away my chance of any outdoor rides now for a few days. Which is a bit sad as I would have quite liked to take an easy ride outdoors. But then I wanted to get the harder work in the books. Worse case I’ll do something Zwift-y tomorrow, but something easy. Or easier.
Anyway, I think that’s everything I had to say today.
A tough workout. But not overly long. And it felt good to get it ticked off. Next week it’s hill training, or simulated hills. Sounds like another tough ride.
