Zwift Team Time Trial, Thursday

My cadence isn’t anywhere near that exciting, ever, I think my legs would actually drop off!

@nixie is that a good or bad response to the cadence?!

Embedded that for you ;

Nice consistent power.

I’ll post mine later when I’m on a PC.

*thank you – one of these days I’ll remember which of the various hosting sites actually work!

But yes, I guess the single detected interval is largely to do with not getting any let up really yesterday, there’s a couple of spikes I could have done without when I got dropped but mostly pretty stable with a little increase on the passes.

@robbo1234biking I’m guessing he means good, if nothing else your legs windmilling round like that is likely to reduce your want of cooling fans any how!

Here’s mine.

@robbo1234biking just a remark really. I don’t really know how high is high (or too high / too low etc). I think though high is good (definitely better for no killing your legs on each stroke). I’ve been trying to move mine up but in the last few races have tried working at 85-90 instead of higher as I think the high rate was tiring me too much. Still using fast for cruising.

Let’s see if this works, here’s my data from intervals.icu. I think it shows really clearly the efforts and the rest periods.

https://i.postimg.cc/7Yg3ft2C/20-BF6-ABA-054-C-4733-9-B51-084-CC44738-A9.png

Those are some lovely flat intervals. I don’t think mine looks like that even on erg mode!

@woodster that makes me think you might be a robot.

I know! I’m quite impressed, even the cadence doesn’t spike until the last KM when the power went up a bit.
300 watts is perfect for me. I do 310 watts as my over/under intervals, 300 watts for 1 minute and then a good few minutes under ftp feels really good. I can keep in a big gear at a lower than normal cadence on the recovery bits, I then just increase the cadence slightly for the 1 minute interval, in my head it stops me surging and helps keep the power even.

That is crazily perfect intervals. 44 seconds of coating though – Phil would not be pleased!

@nixie I did a year of TrainerRoad about a year ago now (Zwift Was more fun in lockdown but tr is a better training programme).

2018 av cadence was 70.2
2019 av cadence was 78.9
2020 av cadence was 90.5
So far this year has been 93.2
So has gradually been creeping up. I don’t pay much attention to it anymore but I rarely change gear in flat races like last night just change my cadence to push some higher watts. Variety of cadence is pretty useful for riding real life trails.

According to a WTRL post on FB, WTRL allocate start delays randomly, although in Zone 9 they are prioritised based on the number of TTT’s completed – which seems a good way to do it.

Wonder if that might come to all Zones, or I am missing something…

although in Zone 9 they are prioritised based on the number of TTT’s completed – which seems a good way to do it.

Wonder if that might come to all Zones, or I am missing something…

I’m not so sure that’s a good idea, our zone wasn’t the worst last night by any means and we were both circa 20min. it could mean if you’re trying to put together a new team you’re permanently delayed by 30+ minutes.

Makes planning a bit easier but because of the way it currently works its a chunk of time to just have to sit around every week. That wouldn’t be so bad if the zones were half hourly or something but without evening that up a bit you could easily see newcomers stuck with daft starts.

By way of comparison – how the other half lives – I’m not sure what to take from this other than I haven’t hit my FTP for quite a while.

As it may give some of you a giggle… This is me exploding on the crit in Robbo’s Races.

But it does make me notice that intervals doesn’t seem to be automatically recognising /assigning intervals and I’m sure it used to. Do you lot have to highlight your own or do you know if I’ve unticked a ticky box somewhere?

Ant, to my inexperienced eye, it shows your effectively working a lot harder than me. Intervals.icu hasn’t picked up all of your intervals, but if you click at the start of each peak and then click on Add Interval (A) you’ll see some more zone 5 sections.
But the first half of the race your pretty much between zone 4 and 5, so where I get to recover in zone 3 your still in zone 4.

If @woodster gets a robot to ride his bike @dangeourbrain just gives a child a crayon and uploads the results.
You can almost see your thought processes at times in that crit Brian.

@dangeourbrain mine does them automatically.

@haloric you’re being a bit harsh on yourself there – looks like someone pulling his weight in an organised collective effort to me. Maybe the intensity of your efforts dropped off towards the end (but that’s not really unexpected eh?). When you push, you push pretty hard (it’s going in and out of the purple, on a 30s average, for half the race…), and between that you can see you have less scope than, say, @w00dster, to recover in between at the pace the group is ticking along at, which takes it out of you. These are interesting graphs, I think @w00dster’s and @haloric’s taken together in particular are a sign of latte being ridden well.

I might start looking at more than just my 1/5/20 mins power in intervals.

And this is what as solid Z4 training session (or desperately trying not to get dropped) looks like. 40 minutes just below FTP and those spikes aren’t pulls on the front but passes and sprints to stay on the back!

Zwift felt quite laggy for me last night, I would be sat near the back then the pack would swerve and reshuffle and suddenly I would be getting the 5m warning with no notice.

Last week I was convinced it would be easier on the flat with more drafting, this week I kept dreaming of a downhill. Looking forward to next week already – what is wrong with me…

You can almost see your thought processes at times in that crit Brian

Yeah, it’s fairly obvious in that one.

Bugger missed the group.
OK I’m in the group.
This is motoring.
Ugggh, don’t die.
I can’t keep this up. (I averaged about 375w for the first 4.5 minutes of that race, with an ftp of 305 ish that’s a big ask!)
Catch group 2. (30sec @390 and missed them)
Nope
Catch Robbo’s group. (that spike is 45sec at 420 to catch on, of which 30sec @470)
That took a bit of welly but OK.
Nope. (3.5 min @340 to hold Robbo’s group)
Just get home, a few laps at barely moving.
A lap at easy.
A lap at proper pace to finish.

@yanboss, that’s great consistency. It’s showing me that there are a good few riders where the only thing keeping me ahead is the weight difference! Your power output is strong.

Your just to tall Brian – even in the draft your head is sticking above everyone else’s. Imagine your avatar looks like this:

https://media0.giphy.com/media/aBfSGPDRDSdqw/giphy.gif

P.S I have no idea how to embed a gif in this forum!

Thats familiar but it isn’t my avatar robbo 😂

And don’t be sizist anyway – it’s not my fault I’m taller than the rest of you!

If we’re all sharing. I’ve had a dabble..

Most telling thing is I coasted for 1 second! I need to learn to rest between pulls and be more @Woodster. I think the first spike is getting back on and through to do a turn, the second was an overtake. It’s the sticky draft that I struggle with. A couple of times last night I was well positioned at 2nd or 3rd wheel to take a turn and the front guy would ease and I’d be in his draft, others would swamp me and I’d need to push for about 10 seconds to get to the front for my turn. After a while, I’d just try and stay near the front which is obviously wasted energy.

@savoyad. Thanks for your comments. I really like the team aspect and agree it’s good to keep the core of STW and More STW together with a change or two to suit attendance or if someone just fancies it.

^ Image posting not happening. Link:

TTT

https:/

Here’s mine, more to try posting a photo more than anything else.

Having difficulty posting the image without including a direct link to my Flickr page.

@slowpuncheur

@drew you need the actual image URL. Can normally get this by asking your browser to open the image in a new tab.

Really interesting looking at the data from Thursday in intervals.icu. I’m lightweight so ride majority of the TT at close to FTP in order to keep up. To get to the front I have to put huge (for me) power so I end up often second wheel not quite getting ahead.

Interesting my power spikes are my few turns when I do get to the front and on the downhill sections where I have to go flat out to stay on the back. Really enjoying the TTs. Need to keep practicing my drafting/recovering which is improving. If I don’t I think zwift power will bump me to cat A as I’m teetering on the border at 4.1 W/kg.

I credit the TTT in lockdown 1 for most of my gains then. The go hard, recover, repeat cycle is great for improving.

Thanks for posting my image @nixie and good to hear the TTT resulted in gains for you. It feels like an over/unders workout at the minute.

.

https://postimg.cc/7bt6wJ8z
Finally managed to get a link but don’t know how to embed it.

@drew on post image there is a hot link for forums with a little copy button next to it. You just need to copy and paste that.

Now we just need someone to overlay all the data plots and show that we were all pulling at different times and there wasn’t any wasted effort!

Cheers Robbo

Ooh this intervals.icu thing looks cool.
I happened to end up in the same zone as you guys, by myself, after having a sensor fault in the earlier session.
The cadence thing is to an extent due to individual phisiology I guess – slower cadence is mechanically more efficient but needs higher muscle forces, higher cadence loads the cardio a bit more.

Two teams entered for Thursday, 7.40pm.

This week it’s 3 laps of volcano flat. Quite similar terrain to last week, but a bit longer.

Sign up to category A here: https://www.zwift.com/events/view/1744993 (the sooner the better)

Bump. Get signed up people.