Rather unsurprisingly, I missed the 12 noon Crit City race today that I had wanted to ride. Getting on early enough to have a proper warm up means getting on at 11:45, and on a working day that’s not always possible. Meetings and unexpected Teams messages mean the end to all my best laid plans.
Fortunately I did have a back up plan in mind today, by way of Zwift’s Workout of the Week. This week the WotW is Step by Step.
Depending on where you look, this workout is either 30 minutes or 40 minutes… and most peculiarly the wrong info seems to come from Zwift themselves:
That’s the email I got.
30 minutes, 44 sweaty faces… which I think means TSS?
Then underneath their text says 40 minutes.
Also the intensity graph depiction is wrong… so a bit of a fail there.
Here’s what it shows in-game:
That’s 40 minutes, 53 stress points (sweaty faces?), and the intensity is a ramp up, not four blocks at one intensity then the fifth and final at a higher intensity.
WhatsOnZwift also provide a breakdown, and they do the best job of it:
It’s a shame really that, still, you need to go external to find the correct information in the most useful format.
Anyway, enough whinging.
The workout itself seems to fit into my sweet spot of 40-50 minute efforts over this Advent of Cycling challenge I’ve set for myself. Not overly intensive, but a good burn without killing myself so I don’t wish to ride again tomorrow.
The breakdown of this workout is fairly straightforward.
There is a 5 minute gentle ramp warm up.
Then there are three 30 second ramp efforts:
- 30 seconds at 95% FTP @ 95rpm
- 30 seconds at 105% FTP @ 105rpm
- 30 seconds at 115% FTP @ 115rpm
Each of these gets a 30 second breather between down to 50% FTP @ 85rpm.
As ever with these quick changes, you have to be careful that the sudden sharp change in resistance doesn’t cause any knee jerks. This is more likely to happen, in my opinion, at the end of the high intensity dropping down into the low. Just be careful.
Warm ups done, the one take away I had was … jeez, 30 seconds is a tiny amount of time to recover, and I’d only been doing 30 second on… how would I feel after 90 seconds on with 30 seconds to recover?
Well, I only had a 2 minute breather before it was time to find out.
Going into the first block of five, being fresh, I was fine enough after the first 90 seconds on.
Even after the second one, I wasn’t feeling too bad.
But somewhere into the third block I thought… oh, hello, this isn’t fun.
One thing’s for sure, I was glad I’d paused my workout during the initial warm up to grab a towel, because the sweat situation got real from then on.
The challenge really is three fold:
- How quickly can you lower your heart rate in those 30 second rest intervals?
- Being able to mentally accept that each 90 second on block gets that much harder, and;
- Knowing you have to do it twice over.
For me, blocks 3 & 4 in the first set were the hardest of the lot.
Block 5 wasn’t as bad because I knew that it would soon by time for a 5 minute recovery, and on the second go around, it was < 90 seconds until it was all done and dusted.
But yeah, none of this was fun.
The strangest thing today was in that after the first 5 intervals were done, and I was ~2.5 minutes into my 5 minute recovery, I was like… OK, that wasn’t sooo bad, I could do that again.
Then jumping into the second set, already fatigued, my heart rate was already higher than it had been by the second block from the first set. I guess that doesn’t make much sense when I’ve read it back, but I can’t think how to word it better. Essentially you are already fatigued going into that second block, even if after 5 minutes recovery you might not feel like it.
So no wonder the second block is more taxing.
As with any of these things, you just have to knuckle down and see it through. There wasn’t any point where I thought about giving up. Though I was ready for it to be over fairly early on 🙂
Once it was over with, as I’d picked the “new” Watopia Waistband route from last night’s Zwift 1.32 release, I stayed on and put in another 5 minutes of intensity to see out the full route to get the badge.
All in then, a good days workout.
Not sure what to do tomorrow, but it’s going to be a shorter one. If I’m not mistaken (and I might be), I think that new Zwift patch has added in some new <30 minute workouts. So hopefully there’s something light and airy for me to get ~10km done and keep that Advent calendar streak alive.
On that front, the one thing I’m worried about that I’m sure I didn’t have last time around is saddle sores. I’d forgotten about this before starting the challenge and already I’m in a bit of pain. Yikes.
