I’m a couple of weeks into my rekindled relationship with Zwift now. I’m still enjoying it. The purpose of it is to keep me fit and cycling during the winter months amongst a community of riders rather than endless solo workouts. Throw in a splash of racing and it gives me a bit of focus too so here’s a brief recap on my progress so far.
There are a couple of things to look at. Races give me actual numbers, data I can compare because it’s fair to say I’m riding full gas for the duration and I’m empty by the end. The other rides have been endurance which go on feel and the outcomes feel anecdotal so lets have a look at them first.
I’ve done a few endurance rides now. 60-90 mins deliberately picked to be a pace high enough to be a decent effort with a training effect and not so hard it feels like a race and leaves me wiped out. For me thats in the 2.5-3.2 w/kg range, my sweetspot. Anecdotally I’ve felt better able to cope with an elevated average effort in just a few rides. It feels like I’m still just getting used to riding indoors again. Constant prescribed effort with a few surges. It’s felt like good training and has helped the racing as you’ll see in a mo. They can be a bit monotonous. Who likes riding indoors for 60mins+? but turning the heads up display off (HUD) and switching to first person camera mode has helped cope with that and make it feel more real. So the conclusion here is group rides are great, just continue to make them worth the effort.
Now racing. I’ve only done 3 in the past 10 days but there has been some tangible progress. My first race was a short 18km effort as a D cat. My category alone was something I had to fix ASAP just for pride’s sake as and ex-A&B cat lol. I found that first race really hard to be honest. I wanted to cave in so many times in the last few km but I dug in and finished but I paid for it. The next couple of days my legs were pretty sore for a 28 min effort and strong evidence my top end was very, very blunt and needed sharpening. Without going into too much data detail my normalised power was 232 watts. Low but a line in the sand and something to build on.
My next race was a bit of a daft move. I rode The National Forest Explorer last Sunday and stupidly tried to race the following day on tired legs. Computer said no, so that was a DNF after about 10km of fatigue-ridden legs complaining with that dull ache we all know. No idea what I was thinking, I should have just done a recovery ride.
Fast forward to yesterday and I was a bit stretched for time to do an endurance ride so I decided to do a race of a similar length (17km) to the first one and see how it compared. The roll out was ok again. I remember the first minute of Zwift races in the past always been a full-gas effort but I’m not complaining. I settled in and felt pretty comfortable throughout, even when the road went up and I had to dig in a bit. With 2km to go there was a lengthy drag which was the selection point and I managed to hang onto the coat tails of the lead group and get to the finish with them but it had burnt one too many matches I think. I summoned a sprint with 250m to go but it was probably 100m too soon and I went from about 4th to about 18th as I freewheeled over the line.
The numbers don’t lie and my normalised power was up by 9 to 237 watts. In fact my numbers were up across the board for my 20min, 5min, 1min and 15s power. My max heart rate was the highest I’ve seen for a few years too. Solid progress and evidence I’m beginning to sharpen up. I’m now in Cat C which takes me from upper D to middling C. So happy with that. I just need to keep doing what I’m doing. Endurance sprinkled with the odd race or workout to sharpen the top end.
…oh and I’ve inadvertantly joined a team on Zwift too. More on that next time
Adios