Virtual Racing

Over the Easter break I ended up having a couple of monster weeks, with 20+ hours of training per week. That was made up of 15 hours a week of turbo work and 5-6 hours of walking with Sue. After the second week I was absolutely shattered. To be honest, if just crept up on me. Quite a few of the guys and gals on Tritalk were getting heavily involved in Zwift as well as a few clubmates and I got caught up in the excitement. While work has been busy during the lockdown period, with a lot less commuting and other work commitments it's been very easy to get onto the turbo and work on my ftp.

My week has evolved as Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays being TrainerRoad sweetspot or threshold sessions, while Tuesdays and Thursdays have been steady club group rides on Zwift, with a longer ride on Sunday. it seems to be working and the mix of Zwift and TrainerRoad has kept things interesting.

Two weeks ago, I ended up doing The Uber Pretzel, one of the longer rides on Zwift. I thought it would take me around 4 hours, but in the end it was around 5. I even had a coffee stop at 2 hours, so the proceeding 3 became my longest ever continuous stint on a turbo. My gooch took a bit of a battering, but Zwift most definitely makes the time go by a lot more quickly than it normally would.

I dialled it down last Sunday, with a much more manageable 2.5 hours, riding The Hilly Route. It was quite cool, when riding up the volcano, I ended up in a group with Ritchie Porte, Wout Poels, Cam Wurf and few other Trek Segafredo riders, who were doing some gentle Zwift miles. I know that it was only in a virtual world and I was only riding alongside their avatars, but it was still quite cool.

Leading Ritchie Porte out, up the volcano #fanboy

So with quite a few hours under my belt, I decided  to skip the club ride last night and encourage a couple of clubmates to ride a crit race with me. 12 laps of a short, flat loop, which should take about an hour. It was a real blast. I managed to get into a group of about 15 riders, running in about 30th place of 90 or so riders and over the course of 9 laps or so, that slowly whittled down to 7 of us. In Zwift racing, powerups are quite key and I got a ghost powerup at halfway, which I decided to keep until the end. the ghost allows you to disappear for 10 seconds so the other riders cannot see your avatar and my plan was to use the downhill section to kick off the front of the group and get a gap, to hopefully hold until the line. It almost worked; but not quite! I put in my kick and got a gap, but not big enough to get away fully, so 2 other riders pipped me on the line. I simply don't have the big power numbers to be a sprinter. Anyway, top 10 in my category, which was nice.

All that said, I ended up averaging over 300 watts for well over 20 minutes and my ftp bumped from 274 to 285watts! Only 3 watts down on my all time ftp best. Even better, I know there is still quite a bit more to come and a 300watt ftp actually looks achievable. Stoked!

Getting there, bit by bit

What are you training for?

1 outdoor ride in a month

My daily exercise has consisted of a family walk and a visit to the #palaceofpower, for a Trainerroad or Zwift session. I’ve quite a few club mates and friends who are out doing 50 odd miles on the bike, but that’s just not for me. Some of them don’t have a turbo and are living on their own, so I fully understand getting out for a ride for their own sanity and well being, but I’ve got a turbo and I don’t need to be outside on a bike, so I’m happy to do all my riding on a turbo. The one exception was a gentle 40 minute spin with little wheezy, her first ride on a road bike. I think we saw a handful of cars, the whole ride. It was actually quite lovely.

But knowing that I’m going to be spending a lot more time on the turbo, I’ve had a massive clear up and clear out and tried to make my setup much more user friendly. The palace is in fact, our garden shed, admittedly, a relatively spacious one, but a shed, nonetheless. It’s very damp and cold in the winter and very hot and airless in the summer, and with the weather turning as we hit this Easter weekend, I needed to set about making it as comfortable and ergonomic as possible.

So, after clearing a lot of space, I’ve now set things up so that my iPad is easier to see.  I bought a fan from Amazon, which has a remote control so I can set it just so, depending on how much power I’m kicking out. The low setting is fine for when I’m noodling along,  high for the VO2 max interval efforts. My head is pretty close so I’ve got a really good airflow over my body, and as I’ve now placed my turbo by the windows, I can have them open too, so that I have a good airflow going through the space.  I’ve screwed a bottle cage to the wall, so that I can get my fluids a lot more easily and bought a 4 way extension lead which also has 4 USB ports, so I can keep my iPad and phone charged up as well as charging Garmins and lights too. I even bought myself a proper riser block for the front wheel, having finally got rid of the 2015 edition Next catalogue, high over the years has got lower and lower as pages got torn off.

It’s sooooo much better with this setup and just means I’m hopping onto my bike and not having to set things up to get going. It goes without saying that within 30 minutes of me completing this, on my next ride, my turbo broke and got a puncture! The knob that pushes the roller against the tyre sheared off in my hand; I’ve ordered a new one and I can just about get it to work until it arrives next week. Vexing though!
As of writing, I’ve ridden over 200 miles on the turbo, this week.  Most of that has been while chatting to club mates, but I did give my first Zwift race a go. I started at the back and decided to hop my way through the field and see how far up I could get. I ended up 27/125, so pretty chuffed and ended up pushing some quite large watts for almost an hour. I’m really noticing the effect of having a fan, as my rpe is so much lower for the given watts.

A couple of weeks ago, I ended up deleting all of my planned races from my Training Peaks account. The homepage then went from telling me that Ironman Copenhagen would be in 16 weeks to ‘What are you training for?’ That question can be answered in two different ways, so now I’ve had some thinking time, I can now answer them.

What are you training for?
I’m training to stay fit; keep my weight in check; catch up with friends through Zwift and Strava; build my ftp; keep my immune system strong. For the foreseeable future, this is the most important ‘What am I training for?’ Just keeping a sense of balance and purpose while we go through these crazy times.

What are you training for?
Next year is the London-Edinburgh-London audax and I’ve wanted to do this for a while. It’s every 4 years, so it doesn’t come around too often. It’s next July, so will fit in with the school holidays and work. Being a member of Audax Uk, I should get a guaranteed entry, but if for some reason, I can’t , then there is also the London-Lands End-London audax, which would be a great substitute.
As this will mean preparing for going long, I’m also going to focus on 100 mile time trials, and see if I can go under 4 hours. Tbh, this is a massive stretch target. My 50m pb (1hr57), set a few years ago would suggest that it’s possible, but possible and probable are two very different things. I just don’t think I’m going to have the time or space to do a long course triathlon next year; I think I would just be spreading myself too thin, and with the 100m TT target, there will be a number of opportunities in the course of the season to have a go, so I won’t be putting all my eggs in one basket.

2020, from a racing point of view, now seems a complete write-off, but I can use this time wisely to have a stonking 2021.

That escalated quickly

My last post seems, literally, like it was different in a different time, in a different world. How everything has unravelled since then, with Ironman, injuries, cycling, ftp values and the like, seeming so irrelevant and frankly, quite a bit indulgent.  But, this blog has always been about those self-indulgent things and let’s face it, it doesn’t get much more indulgent than a middle age, middle of pack athlete writing a blog. A lot has changed.

I’m not now doing Ironman Copenhagen. Although not cancelled, yet, I really can’t see how it is going to go ahead. I sincerely hope it does, as I know of a few athletes who have sunk a lot of money into going already, with accommodation and flights booked, not just for them but for family too. Those for whom it would be their first IM, it is particularly tough. But my situation is very different. I don’t need to tick the ‘completion’ box; I’ve been there and done that, twice.  Copenhagen, for me, was always about proving to myself that I could put together a performance that I would be proud of and with this summer now being so disrupted, even if it does go ahead, it was the right decision for me to withdraw. 

The last couple of weeks have been beyond strange. Work was insanely busy and frenetic and like most people, training went from being very important, as a glue that held my days together and gave me a massive focus for this summer, to not being important at all. I had reached an all time high TSS, very nearly hitting the magical 100, and I was just about managing the load; getting lighter, getting faster. 

Luckily, my lack of organisation helped me out. My passport had recently run out, so I had not been able to book any flights and by the time it arrived, three weeks ago, it seemed crazy to fork out £250 on flights to an event that seemed very unlikely. Although I had booked accommodation, I could cancel without incurring a fee. The only fly in the ointment was losing 50% of the entry fee, a not insignificant sum. Why not defer until next year, I hear you ask? Well, Copenhagen doesn’t fit in with other family stuff and while there are other Ironman events throughout the year, as things stand, I’m not sure what 2021 will entail. I have a few ideas, but I will leave that for another post. 

The last couple of weeks have been a readjustment.  Instead of full on Ironman training, I’ve been focussing on a daily fitness session, while I figured out what I wanted to do. Running has been replaced with a walk with Sue, chewing the cud and using our Government allowed exercise time to catch up and chill out. With the lockdown in full effect, my turbo and TrainerRoad subscription is coming to the form, but I’ve also spent quite a bit of time on Zwift in my new and improved #palaceofpower. With absolutely no racing I the pipeline for the foreseeable future, I’ve decided to do nothing except improve my power to weight ratio. I’m still got my weight at around 70kg so the plan is to get back onto a TrainerRoad plan with a bit of Zwift racing and see if I can get my ftp over 300 watts. With my power pb being 288, this is going to be tough, but at the moment, I’ve got nothing better to do.