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@blader - my new TacX flux does that with power- especially in ERG mode when I’m doing a workout. I’m getting better at balancing it (seems one leg is more powerful than the other and I’m a flat pedal MTB rider so spinning ain’t my thing!). I tried switching from 3 second average to instant and it was even worse. My Bro has a Neo and he reckons it’s similar.
The bigger issue I have is the workouts often want you to drop from 110rpm to 60rpm. Takes the trainer ages to catch up and it’s all a bit hurry up and wait to get the cadence right. I assume that’s because I don’t have a proper cadence sensor and I’m letting the flux work it out and that’s a big variation to process.
Rode the mega-pretzel last night. All 108 km. wanted to do it in ERG mode at 234 Watts#, but couldn’t work out how to set it on my KICKR. Anyway first two hours I nailed 234 Watts average based on 30sec average on Garmin. Then I bonked a bit for the last hour and 210. All over in 3:20. Sadly still no trip up the Alpe. Lessons: need more than n 750 ml of water, something to eat would be good, a fan would be nice too!
#234 Watts (3.4 W/kg) for three hours is 2.5 MJoules. It’s also my planned 100 mile TT power.
Nice work. I keep eying the pretzel routes then thinking better of it.
Nice win Bigfoot, a win is a win regardless of how many finishers.
Thats a big effort Tired, 3 hours at 234w is quite an ask at the best of times.
Ok second ride on the kickr core and i still just cant get my head round the figures i am seeing. Straight out the gate and i realise that in order to stay with the front group i had to be in second to top gear, i only had 1 gear left so i was essentially running out of gears. I stuck with the A group but i knew i was hanging on even though we were only doing 260w. I went pop at 1.5 laps in and then just went backwards so fast i may as well have uturned. I finished the race close to last and only avg 208w on a flat course and i was exhausted. So has moving to a direct drive trainer rather than smart wheel on basically “found me out”? Is it possible that my tacx although fully updated and calibrated every ride was essentially about 33% inaccurate? Even warming up was weird, i went on the flat route and the downhill/sprint to the finish banner i was in middle of the cassette and front big ring turning at 88rpm and i crossed the line doing less than 100w. The readings i see throughout the race just seem strange, constantly changing even though my cadence was steady and so was the gradient. I dont get the sense that anything is broken,just seems odd to what i am used to and may be that is the problem. Should i just forget everything that i did before and get used to the new readings? I am also getting over a bout of cat aids so i will factor that in to my fitness level. Going to ride every day this week to try and get used to it and have a play with the settings. I am racing with my mate tomorrow on zwift and i have never lost to him but i get the feeling that could change as he averages 250w.
Welcome to C ;0)
Have you got access to a power meter to try at the same time?
After posting in the thread way back, and now having an almost 18 month old Son.. I bypassed buying a trainer and had been using my folding indoor bike to do intervals for about the last six months. However.. I've now successfuly modded it to have an ant+ speed & cadence sensor (the cocospoo whatever it is 20 quid one from amazon) and have a powertap/powercal ant+ chest HRM / (estimating) power meter So I have speed/cadence/hrm/power all talking to my Garmin edge 820 fine. Wont be able to to do ERG obviously, but I can vary resistance and/or gun it to make my heart rate go up.
I'm still time poor but have at least 2 mornings a week where I don't do the nursery run to get a quick 20 mins in, plus can sometimes do the same on the weekends I don't do a real ride.
Now have a ant+ dongle and a tablet mount that should fit a windows tablet I have kicking about.. Whats the best use of these windows of time in Zwift? (I can prob get away with not subcribing for a while as I'll be under the threshold)
I knew you were faking it Blader!
Blader - have you done the advanced calibration rather than standard spindown? I had problems initially with my setup until I did this so might be worth a try. It's not obvious in the App, but tap 5 times on the spin down text to bring it up (really).
EDIT: For context last time I felt I had to do one was after a firmware upgrade. I was going up libby hill at max heart rate barely able to turn the gears and it was reporting about 200W. On the flat the figures seemed normal.
I'm afraid of running calibration incase it's been over reading.
Weeksy - thats exactly what it feels like, total fraud.
Thanks for the heads up Mr PH, i will give it a try tomorrow.
Now i am not saying i am a powerhouse and i expect my tacx flow will be poor in accuracy but warming up i am regulary seeing between 80-100w yet i am in middle of the cassette (5th gear) and in big ring at front doing 90rpm. That was my group tempo gear that i would use for hovering around 200w+ normally. I got beat by 2 cat C riders today by 3 mins! I was challenging top B last week, that is a hell of a fall from grace.
Where does the kickr core measure the power, i assume its not with the flywheel as the second i stop pedalling it goes to 0w even though the flywheel is still spinning quite fast?
If you’ve been ill or are fighting off an infection, your power will be down an easy 10% or more. I see it in my road rides every time (also 100 km and 3:10-3:25). When not going well I’ll be lapping at 3:40. There may also be a difference in calibration, but illness is often a factor.
And my ride was 235/245/205 watts. Will feed next time. Considering a headwind fan too.
Did the Matt Hayman Paris Roubaix workout last night. Did the first 30 mins or so at full bias but had to turn it down to about 90% to be able to carry on. It is based on your FTP though and after Xmas I would say I am about 10% down so that is prob about right. Also did a couple of races over the weekend so my legs are a bit fatigued. Still a good work out though and pretty tough.
Tired - i feel much better now but i have factored in that my fitness may be compromised. I just cant justify that illness would cause an 80w average drop over a race that was only 55mins long. I still cant understand why i often see my wattage in just double figures when warming up, i am not going that slowly and not in a low gear. I will play with the settings today and see what happens.
Sounds odd to me
I got UGD last night - did not realise I was a B now. Bugger.
Not that fit at present but made the mistake of seeing how long I could hang with a better group - subsequently posted a higher 20min W/kg figure before fading.
Not going to get to race for podiums for a bit I suspect.
Weird one today, signed up for the Tour stage whatever, jumped on with 2 mins so go, the saw I was at the bottom cog, then worked out I still had the 32T front ring on. Oops. Too late now.
But it worked really well, I just span it along using 9th and 10th gears. 105 max rpm and 85 average according to Strava. Looking at my usual rides on zwift I run lower cadence, sometimes as low as 78/79rpm.
I wonder if that's playing a factor when riding, I seemed to have the ability to hit and hold 330-350w when I needed it.
I may try the 36T to give me 1 more if desperate but try and spin it a bit more.
Can 7-8 rpm really matter?
Tour Stage 5 for me this evening too on my newly-replaced, blissfully quiet Flux. That last climb was a hard work on the final lap, but overall managed to be almost spot on my FTP power average for the event.
Weeksy, I think it can as the muscles are doing less each rotation.
SO, recovery rides, Z2 rides, whatever you want to call them.
Now, assuming my max HR is 182-183. Assuming my power FTP according to Zwift is 285w....
Then what do i need a recovery to be ? Either in HR or in FTP.
I'm well aware of the mantra of doing rest days too hard, so want to take it easier... i'm thinking 90mins.
Weeksy, Do it as a %age of FTP. Recovery/Zone 2 is 56-75% of FTP according to the Coggan table. So in your case, keep it between 160 and 214 watts. A few very short bursts to get the legs moving and heart rate up helps, I find.
160 is better than i thought.... i'll work with that... I honestly think 214 would be a little high for recovery, especially as 285 is IMO optimistic 🙂
There's an active recovery workout for Zwift here.
If you think your FTP is a bit high you can just knock the bias down a few percent at the start of the workout.
Got kicked out of Zwift with 90 seconds before the Kiss race last night and there's no way my creaky computer will restart it in that time so ended up doing a TT 10 minutes later.
I'll not be bothering with one of those again for a while. 26minutes of riding at threshold to finish in pretty much the exact position you'd expect to for your FTP. The only highlight was a battled over the last 3 hills at Richmond to keep someone at bay to the line.
I quite like a TT, for pretty much the same reason that you don't - if I want a good idea of my "FTP" it's got a bit more incentive than just pedaling in a test
I don't do 'em often, mind
(Same is also true of TTs on the road. Maybe I am a pervert)
I quite like short TTs outside.
Yeah not mad keen on a 20min FTP test but "enjoy" the ramp test version.
My Zwift FTP got bumped to 264 but still below my tested one.
And rats I've been upgraded to B on my ZPower profile which to be honest was inevitble. Gone from favourite in most C races to an also ran in B's :0)
12,000 online when i did the Alpe stage yesterday afternoon,
Yeah, I did it at 09:00 and there were over 2500 in the event. The funniest thing was the start where loads of avatars were way off the road. I must admit I got pretty bored just grinding up the Alpe and won't be doing that again any time soon.
done it 11 times now, including twice one day, quite like it, hope they do another GT big climb
Well did 6wk training plan for a holiday in spain. Some good riding (did cumbre del sol climb amongst others) and too much food. Back home did the short Ftp test, never done one before and paced it wrong aimed for 180 watts but went too easy to start with. Ended up at 148watts, i'm 6'6" and 98kg.
So doing the 12wk ftp booster, got some sportives planned. I can plod all day and grind up hills but get droppdd easilly. So we'll what happens over the next few weeks.
I did stage 6 yesterday and today. Still trying to get my head around the difficulty setting in Zwift, which everyone says makes no difference to difficulty, only cadence.
On Sat I had it at 100% and found I was grinding up ADZ in my lowest get struggling to average 60rpm-it was a real workout. Today I set it to 0% and it felt like cheating-I was 20watts up for the same average HR and spinning at about 75-80rpm.
So what's the issue? If watts are watts am I just inefficient at low cadence?
So what’s the issue? If watts are watts am I just inefficient at low cadence?
Yeh - if your lowest gear leaves your cadence too low on a steep climb you're definitely going to lose out (hence all the 50-tooth cassettes on the market)
You'll probably gain little benefit from grinding up that for an hour+ too. I've no wish to do that on the turbo so typically have it at 50% and if I remember knock it down to 20%ish for racing.
Did Stage 6 twice. Both kids wanted to do it. After a glitch first time out eldest got to the bottom and wrapped in so I did intervals up the rest of it. Sunday the youungest got past bend 10 so after a cup of tea I rode tempo to the top giving Ride Ons to every single rider. Hope it helped and shooting past them at twice the WKG didn't depress them. Then did 700+watt sprints out of every corner on the way down and knocked 30 seconds or so off my PR.
Rest week finally as my TR SPBase has got a bit ragged in the last 2 weeks and then Xmas before that messing it up.
I was doing a workout on Saturday. As I crossed the bridge (coming off the climb), the Tour group was coming up. Weird watching 50 or so bikes ‘pop’ into the landscape every couple of seconds. There must have been thousands of them! Fairly impressive technology managing that.
Had another go up the Alpe last night on stage 6, it really doesn't get any easier. I had a good race with another rider who say with me for a while then tried to change pace to drop me a few times. That was the motivation I needed, upped my efforts at corner 4 and managed a 12sec gap over him at the top. It felt like a proper pro battle and made the climb really enjoyable in a sick way. New PR of 55:10 too. Still no increase in FTP though.
I've joined Zwift and enjoyed it more than I thought, last night was a 1hr pottle to see how it all works round London. Is there a STW group or the like I can join so I can add to the more social aspect???
Have you joined ZwiftPower? There is a stw team on there. Also Strava group 'zwifters of singletrack' or similar name.
not yet, I'm still working this all out. Will have a look thanks
ZwiftPower is essential if you want to race. You do need to set your zwift account (via zwift website) to allow ZwiftPower to collect data.
You can also find a fair number of stw users by doing a zwift user Search for stw.
Also did the Stage 6 Alpe climb over the weekend. Can't say I particularly enjoyed it, but there was at least a sense of satisfaction at the top. Roll on stage 7!
PR on AdZ on Saturday....annoyingly I still didnt break the hour.
After Richmond I could hardly walk but felt really quite fresh after Saturdays effort, clearly I wasnt pushing hard enough.
Hi All, I'm a 'previous' STW forum member from many years ago... I've been a Zwift user for 2 years now so I thought I'd come and say hi.
Anyone doing the Cape Epic training program on Zwift? I thought I'd do it as it's billed as a mountain bike 'specific' thing. 6.30pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
I'm a KRT member but I'll add stw to my name as well while riding the workout.
See you out on course!
HEllo.... wasn't aware of that... I'll go look it up 🙂
Stage 7.. flippin' horrible!
30k TT in the 3R ultimate league last night. A lot of the regular riders seem to avoid these so a good opportunity to pick up a decent points score (league is best 5 of 7). Nice and 'flat' on road to ruins 😜. Went quite well though I can't help thinking I could have gone a little harder at points. Started strongly then had a bit of a slump during the second half of the jungle loop. Pushed hard over the pass back out of the jungle then hung on for the last 5k. Equalled my best 95% again at 4.3 w/kg. No real high power bits so legs feel good this morning.