rsbob 

If you are going to fake it, fake it big!

Sierra_rider

Light day today, only a virtual 12ish miles and 1500' climbing this morning. Although, I did supplement that tonight with a weight lifting session...squats, deadlifts, lunges, as well as some other core exercises. I'm not hurting like I was expecting, so that's a bonus.

Troul 

The indoor hotel "gym" lacks my ideal amenities that condones fake mileage accumulation.

jaxgtr

Booooo.......

So I took a mental health day, because why not, and got in 59 miles in a beautifully sunny, but cool, I think the high was 59, day. Light winds as well.

biker128pedal

36 miles of High Bridge rail trail. Not enough time to ride the whole trail. Save that for a warmer day. Very smooth gravel and not crowded.

Sierra_rider

Some virtual miles at work today...Sequoia NP in Rouvy, 22 miles and 2700' of fake climbing. All the vitals while riding seem back to normal after getting the RSV, but I am feeling a bit run down from lack of sleep. It's been a couple of weeks and I've got the nagging cough at night. I know some people that have had the cough for over a month, hopefully not me.

rsbob 

Started using Pillar today for the first time. Easy Zone1 for 45 mins. But trying to maintain a certain number of watts and cadence while riding on rolling terrain is a real challenge - not so much on the trainer. Tomorrow, 2 hours of Z1 and later in the week, intervals.

Sierra_rider

Climbed the virtual Alpe d'Huez after dinner tonight. I was going to shoot for just a low-intensity zone 2 ride, but was feeling good and ended up doing tempo with a 1-minute above threshold surge, every 5 minutes. Ended up doing the virtual Alpe segment at an average of 304 watts for 55 minutes, and I felt like I had much more in the tank, so that's a positive.

Anyway, a grand total of 9 miles and 3500' of fake climbing.

rsbob 

Way to go! Hope you can sleep.

Sierra_rider

Slept really well, only briefly woke up once...which is pretty normal for me.

Got an outdoor gravel ride in after work this afternoon...55 miles and 7300' of very real climbing. The gravel bike with racy gravel tires is a very good descender, I managed to get 2nd O/A on a paved descent/Strava segment.

Sierra_rider

Another gravel ride today, ahead of an impending storm...these roads will likely have snow on them by tomorrow.

40 miles and 5000' of climbing.

rsbob 

Did 55 mins of intervals using, or kind of using, Pillar app and ZWIFT. The free app is just too difficult without the ability to download the workout to ZWIFT. Bungled my way through it anyway and got the heart rate way up and sweated a storm but was totally disappointed. Don’t know how anyone can use the free version at all. Going to abandon and use ZWIFT workouts instead - even though they try to kill me.

Sierra_rider

When I do use Zwift, I often just make my own workouts. The only stock Zwift workouts I'll really use are FTP tests and 2x20' FTP intervals. While I've been bad about not doing much interval training this year, I've done 5x5, 30/30, and 40/20's in the past.

Sierra_rider

While I could ride outside today, 40F and snow melt dripping off the trees, made indoor riding sound more enjoyable. I was also limiting myself to less than 1.5 hours of riding today, so an indoor tempo ride offered a better bang for the buck compared to the constant ups and downs of the local roads.

Anyway, between a couple of Rouvy rides, 19 miles and 2200' of climbing.

georges1

rode 5 km for deposing a package to be sent back in the nearest town nearby mine,used my 1992 peugeot chenonceaux city bike

rsbob 

I need to learn to do that. Is there a tutorial?

Today I said, screw Pillar and was feeling strong-ish and started a pacer group with hills and inevitably went off the front with a group of 10 and kept the pace between 2.6-3.0 W/Kg for an hour. I used the hill climbs as the intervals and would get up around 500 Watts sustained for the hills. Pillar gave me a 35% success rate since I totally blew off the Zone 1 sustained ride. Oh well.

I know what I need to do in terms of a couple of hard workouts, sustained Zone 2 and rest days, so I will just let my body tell me what to do. Up until now, I just went hard and long all the time, and was always fatigued. Just can’t help myself and giving into my age is really difficult. At least I am still bagging PRs.

The Chemist

Nice and warm first Saturday of spring.

Sierra_rider

Click on the "workouts" tab and then select custom. Hit "creat a new workout" and go from there. You'll see that you can drag and drop different power zones from the right-hand side of the screen. Once you drop it into the workout, you can then change the wattage and duration of that particular interval. You can either build it based on wattage or by % of FTP.

I like going this route, as most of the standard Zwift workouts are pretty crappy IMO. They throw random power spikes in and will have weird ramps as well...the standard workouts don't seem to target a specific power zone, but rather just hit everything and are generally what I'd refer to as "junk miles." That's my slightly controversial/maybe unpopular rant of the day.

rsbob 

Thank you. Much appreciated.

Sierra_rider

I'll also add that, from what I've seen on your Strava, you're a pretty strong cyclist, regardless of age. That being said, VO2max goes down with age, so that seems like a valid power zone to target with intervals. Something along the lines of a 30x30 interval...basically 30 seconds on/off at up to 140% and 60% of FTP. Another variation I'll do is 40/20, that's a gnarly workout. The % of FTP is a suggestion and keeping your average HR around threshold level might be a good indicator for adjusting difficulty.

I'd like to reiterate, that I'm not a cycling coach/trainer...just an educated idiot, so YMMV. Although I do have a newbie friend of mine that wants me to build a program for him. He's young and I'm entertaining the idea, just to test the waters on if it's something I might be into if/when I can no longer be a competitive racer.

For years, I took much of the same approach. My criteria for riding was just "hard" and "lots." Invariably, I'd hit a plateau about midway through the year and then physically/mentally need a long break come wintertime. I had frequent training injuries and was always nursing some ache/pain. I pretty much took 2022 off from racing and any serious riding, so last year was a rebuilding year for me. I was in such bad shape, that zone 2 trainer sessions were almost mandatory. After doing a solid 2-3 months of zone 2, I developed a base that I never had before...I used to peak by May, but I ended up setting a PR for FTP clear into September last year.

rsbob 

Interesting back story - so close to home. I sure understand the frequent injuries from my days pushing it as a runner (high school track through grad school - recreationally) Was always trying to recover from something as I experimented with different running styles, pacing, strides, shoes, body position, etc. It got so bad I was running with braces and taking pain killers, just to not lose ‘fitness’. (Can you say, totally possessed?) Then my back couldn’t take the pounding of multi-mile runs so started to slowly transition to cycling - very slowly. But as my running injuries lessened with less running, I put more and more miles on the bike - and the rest is history.

Also interesting about you building a base for 2-3 months. Such patience. Hats off for that and setting a new PR FTP. That is something I may just need to do - with an interval session just to break it up. Really appreciate your help and support. If we lived closer, I’d take you out for a beer or whatever you drink. Cheers

Appreciate the tip on 30X30 and 40/20.

50PlusCycling

I took a 58km ride around Tokyo this morning. I’ve only been on the bike for about 10 days, and am breaking in a new Brooks saddle, but I wanted to get out along the Arakawa river. It took me about 20km of riding across the city to get to the river, but thankfully there was very little traffic, Japanese people like to sleep in on Sunday.

But along the river it was busy. There are countless sports fields along the river, I passed perhaps 30 baseball fields, every single one crowded with little league to 60+ seniors, plus soccer fields, frisbee fields, tennis courts, and golf courses. The biggest hazard riding along the river is getting hit by a ball, at one point a baseball passed about one meter in front of my bike, and a tennis ball passed over my head.

There were lots of cyclists of all ages, plus troops of baseball and soccer players riding their bikes along the river to the sports fields. There were all kinds of bikes, from trikes ridden by old folks, to Disney bikes ridden by little kids, to classic Italian to carbon fiber triathlon bikes. Mine appeared to be the only gravel bike on the trail, not that anyone looked twice at it.

I took it easy, the bike is still new, the saddle still hard, my backside still too soft. But it was a great day and a great ride. Hopefully the weather allows another long ride next weekend.

Sierra_rider

23 miles and 1800' of slick/muddy XC racing today. I've been having mixed results lately, so I was glad to come out of this one with a win in <39 expert class. 3 lap race, I set a heater of a lap on the first lap. Second lap, I dropped back to 2nd and then had a minor spill. Regrouped and caught back up the leader by the last lap. Did some wheel sucking, got my heart rate back down and then threw in a big attack about 5 minutes from the finish. I did my best 20 second power for the season (820watts) establishing the gap and then averaged close to 400 watts for the final 5 minutes...good enough to win by several seconds.

Some other notable stats...I averaged a HR of 173bpm for over 1.5 hours and did a normalized power of 300 watts. Peak power was 1300. Power and HR were definitely on the higher end of what I've been doing lately in races.

ofajen

17 miles and windy today, but it was too nice not to ride despite having run intervals in the morning.

Otto

jevery57

After a fifteen year cycling hiatus I bought a new gravel bike, (I'm 66 this year), I've ridden it twice before today - a couple of twenty mile loops to make adjustments for a preliminary fit and to get used to SPD pedals. So today I was invited to ride a 36 mile loop with a couple of experienced cyclists at work, though it was extremely windy today at 38-50 MPH out of the south. First leg was into the wind and i bonked at the twenty mile mark. My triceps and my ass were killing me and I could tell my blood sugar was very low so they made me eat a couple of bananas and sit awhile. Thankfully the downwind leg was much easier and I survived the day, but I know I'll be sore for a couple of days. It's great to be back in the sport, but at my age I'm gonna have to be more careful about biting off more than I'm ready for.