Zwift – Interval Training

I’ve rarely been told that a scheme I was in was moving from free beta-test to paid monthly subscription and felt excited about it. But that’s what happened this month with Zwift. The excitement was down to two factors. One was the endless potential Zwift has to expand with new courses. And the other was the introduction of Interval Workout Training!

As can be seen above the intro screen now has an option to select

Workout

rather than just the option to Ride.
On selecting Workout the rider is presented with a number of options :

I opted to go for the 73 minute (bizarrely specific) FTP Test. Your FTP or Functional Threshold Power is a measure of the maximum power you can hold for sixty minutes.
The ride started out looking like any other ride but it became clear early on that the Wahoo Kickr was running in “ergo” mode – i.e. no big changes in difficulty when hitting hills etc – just a flat level of intensity depending on the amount of effort put in.

The next thing apparent were a few new on-screen stats. On the left was a panel showing a breakdown of the various segments to be undertaken and at the bottom a spidery line represents the riders’ current progress.

A little message welcomed me to the test (welcome to my nightmare) and the test began. Nice and easy easy to begin with and then with intervals of varying intensity.

The start/end of each interval is marked by a glowing arch:

It was a little disconcerting forty minutes in to be told “your FTP test is about to start” – at that point I was already blowing out of every orifice

And then it was twenty-minutes of kick-your-own-ass grunting shouting effort to the point where the neighbours must have been wondering what on earth I was up to.

At the end I managed an FTP of 232 – which to be honest I have little idea at the moment of whether it’s good, average or (as I suspect) poor. But bizarrely enough I thoroughly enjoyed it. There’s not many times when you can ride a fixed bike for over an hour and feel disappointment when the session is over – especially not interval training which is usually both boring and painful,  but the Zwift/Wahoo Kickr combo manages it with some style.

I have to say I am thoroughly enjoying the Zwift effect.
Highly recommended

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Evenings in with Zwift and Wahoo Kickr

Just a quick post to wax lyrical about how much I am still taken with my Wahoo Kickr fixed bike turbo trainer and   Zwift virtual cycling software combination together with the Strava fitness recording app.

Work has become pretty hectic recently to the point where taking a lunch-hour run feels almost impossible. That combined with my long commute makes it very difficult to maintain any sort of level of fitness. We all know how hard it is to get home in the dark and to go for a late run or head to the gym. And if you do the gym those repetitive laps or hours on a spinning machine can be quite soul destroying.

But with Wahoo and Zwift I’ve discovered a secret weapon. I can get in by 8:15pm and have a 10 mile high intensity cycle ride under my belt before 9pm. More than that – I actually look forward to it! It’s fun to ride alongside other cyclists (albeit remote) from all over the globe. We race against each other, egg on each other and encourage each other. Then when I finish I can indulge my manly love of stats and my competitive urge by logging on to Strava where I get to see how I’m improving, who else was riding around the same time as me and how my efforts compared to theirs. I see how I’ve done for particular segments of the course compared to others and my own previous efforts

There’s an excellent community springing up around Zwift as well. Facebook is full of fascinating posts discussing everything from what your particular set up is to the setting up of virtual clubs and teams for friendly rides and full out competitive races.

And every session can be different – you can go for long “recovery” rides or short burst HIT sessions, or focus on the sprint or King of the Hill sections. Take last night for instance. Late in and food almost ready I still managed to get a worthwhile 15 minute High Intensity session in where I completed a couple of sprint challenges. As can be seen from my fitbit details below I was hitting 150bpm for the sprint sections

One frustration I do have at the moment is that the Zwift app at the moment only really allows you to see who else is riding and (if you’re actually on the course at the time) your current basic stats.

But the Zwift desktop app shows you all sorts of interesting information like speed and power distribution graphs and Zwift appear to have big plans. They’re going from free beta to monthly subscription shortly, then they’re introducing training sessions to complement the course rides already offered and sometime next year the full app will run on iOS and hopefully android.

I for one can’t wait

If you enjoyed this or any of my other posts please visit my just giving page and consider a donation to one of the charities I am supporting – however small, every little will help. Thanks. 

Zwift – Richmond VA

Zwift have released a new course to coincide with the UCI Road World Championships.

Their course designers have been out on the course mapping all the nooks, crannies and cobbles, every uphill climb and downhill rush and have come up with a corker.
For a fuller description as to how the course was built read the  blog by the awesome DC Rainmaker here http://www.dcrainmaker.com/2015/09/course-championships-richmond.html
At 16km it’s significantly longer than the 9km Zwift Watopia Island course although probably not as pretty.

Richmond is more”street” – I half expect to see old newspaper blowing across the road at some points and there are a few under-passes where I wouldn’t want to get a puncture. Definitely a course to ride with Bruce’s “Racing in the Streets” or “Darkness at the Edge of Town” blasting in the headphones.
At the moment it’s taking me about 28 mins to complete which puts me about 1300th of 4400 – not too shabby but I can get better (I CAN).
I was getting some well-dodgy wattage statistics out of my Wahoo Kickr but a restart seems to have sorted that out.

A recent amendment saw a second sprint section and a second KOM section added to add even more spice to those Strava segment comparisons

My Fitbit tells me I burn about 700 cals an hour riding the course which is less than I burn when running or playing five a side – hard to believe as my legs are jelly and my lungs are burning when I hop (fall) off.

My current setup is not quite ideal – I’d love a big immersive screen for the course image but with Zwift on my laptop and Rugby on my iPad I can easily spend an “enjoyable” hour getting my ass kicked on the bike

This will have to do until I can persuade the grrrl that we need to rebuild the glasshouse as a purpose built man-cave. Tiny steps.

Cycling for wimps – Indoor Training with a Wahoo Kickr and Zwift Island

I’m your average middle-aged bloke (well 50plus – is that past middle aged? scary thought – best not dwell on it) who has tried over the years to stay fit mainly through running. I travel a lot for work so the brutally short british winter daylight hours mean keeping it going during the darker months can be a challenge. And a bad winter makes it that much harder to get back on the fitness horse when the spring eventually comes back around (no I don’t have a horse – it’s a metaphor – keep up). On top of that I have a dodgy arthritic knee (the result of a stupid rugby injury) which means it’s not always possible for me to run – it can go weeks or even months feeling stronger than ever and then suddenly it’s like I’m running on ground glass and the knee’s a swollen painful mess making any kind of impact exercise impossible. Arthritis is a bitch. So what to do to keep a regular fitness routine when the weather sucks and the knee blows….

True to form my knee flared up a few weeks back so I started looking at my options.The first was the rowing machine we have in the garage – a leftover from the girls membership of the local rowing club. Great cardio workout but… well it’s a rowing machine right? As exercise goes it doesn’t go anywhere (metaphorically or literally) and for me it gets a bit boring. Plus as a clumsy top-heavy, balance-free oaf I’m never going to get in an actual boat and row so aside from the health benefits, it all feels a bit pointless. It’s a good added extra for my training plan then but it’s never going to be up there as my goto alternative to running.
The Missus is also into keeping fit and she recently mentioned getting a turbo – a fixed wheel trainer for the bike. So after a little research I shelled out for one “for her” for Xmas and got myself – I mean her – a Cycle-ops Fluid 2 turbo. I set it up in the conservatory and off we went.
Right off the bat I loved it. I set an old iPad and an android phone on a music stand in front of it so I could watch YouTube spinning classes (sad I know) and could record my stats while cycling along on the turbo. At this point you’re probably thinking “why doesn’t the idiot just cycle outdoors?” Well – tried that and a) traffic and bikes dont mix, b) british winter weather, short days, my work travel timetable and outdoor cycling dont mix and c) last time I was out I hit a pothole, bust a wheel and went ass over elbow. To be fair when I was lucky enough to work close enough to home I did cycle to and from the office for five years. But now the chance would be a fine thing. Plus I stopped doing that when a transit van knocked me off the bike. For a self-employed person the idea of breaking something (or worse) just to keep fit is not appealing.
I digress….

The Fluid 2 is a great bit of kit, you just pop the rear wheel of your bike onto the fiction wheel, jump on and ride. It’s simple, robust and relatively cheap and it gives a very realistic riding experience. And when you want to get outdoors, just unclip from the turbo and off you go – couldn’t be simpler. I’d definitely recommend it as a starter turbo.
It will become evident that I love a bit of tech and there are a load of apps out there for the phone or tablet to monitor heart-rate, calories burned, power, distance, speed etc so the phone, ipad and Fluid 2 combination were great. I was off and running and loving it (yes another metaphor – or is it a simile?). There was just one problem. Or two actually. Firstly the higher I set the friction the quicker I burned through inner tubes – I’ve never had so many flats. And secondly try as I might I just could not get the resistance up to that killer level that I wanted.
I had also recently started using the fixed cycle at the work gym and the resistance levels on that made my Fluid 2 feel a bit underwhelming. Now this is not to criticise the Fluid 2 turbo – I’m sure it was something to do with my setup , but whatever it was I started to feel frustrated. So I cast around for alternatives – something that would give the experience of a three grand gym bike without the eye watering price tag.
My first thought was a Watt Bike These baby’s are (apparently) used by the British Cycling Team so must be pretty good. However price again put me off – you’re looking at somewhere towards the £2k mark – too rich for my blood. So I settled on a Wahoo Kickr . This one is endorsed by the Sky Team and on the eye-watering-cost scale it’s closer to a punch on the nose than the Watt Bike’s full-on kick in the minerals. Expensive – but you can get it on finance ( e.g. from Wiggle ) which I can justify as the same as a years gym membership.
The Kickr is a great bit of kit. No great is too understated. I love it and basically want to have it’s babies.
Compared to the Fluid 2 it delivers a max power outage of about 2100 watts which is more than enough for my requirements. It’s very quiet and delivers a really realistic road-like feel to the point where I find myself trying to lean into corners on Zwift Island (more on this on a bit) or trying to take a more aerodynamic posture (so laughable if you’ve ever seen my non-aerodynamic silhouette)
It’s easy to set up – just drop your back wheel off and pop the rear of the bike onto the Kickr, adjust the height, plug it into the mains and your ready to roll – there’s not much more to it than that.

But the true delight with the Kickr is the number and ways it interacts with different apps and applications. For a start as well as recording just about every type of statistic you could ask for (power, cadence, speed, heartrate etc) the free Wahoo app itself let’s you control the resistance of the device in various modes – so suddenly those YouTube spinning videos can really be like being in a class. On top of which it interacts with any number of third party apps available e.g. Trainer Road to deliver an engaging challenging training experience. I’d recommend DC Rainmaker’s blog for a pretty comprehensive list of the software available and an in depth review of the Kickr.
For me though the killer app is Zwift Island . It’s like a Wii app for cyclists where you ride in real time against other people on a virtual tropical island. It’s fun, it’s challenging, it makes training interesting but most of all it’s addictive. Just this week I found myself racing around the imaginary island at 1am! In fact my biggest challenge is getting the Missus and Thing 2 (the younger daughter) off it long enough to get some time in on it myself.
I’ll probably be writing a lot more on this over time but at the moment, suffice to say I am really really loving the Kickr and Zwift combo – and I can’t wait to see how they both develop over time.
If you enjoyed this or any of my other posts please visit my just giving page and consider a donation to one of the charities I am supporting – however small, every little will help. Thanks.