It has been a busy week!  With a stay-at-home order for Leon County & the City of Tallahassee, the kids on what is now WEEK TWO of their extended spring break and continuing to operate a business while my wife powers forward with Hang Tough Foundation providing a very vulnerable population the supplies to help keep many of their children alive and well.  All of it means that to continue training and riding, I must get creative. A little less sleep, and a little more flexibility can only last for so long but riding indoors has seemed to be the easier of the options allowing me to be here when needed and still get the work done that is necessary.

So, on with the Zwift Group Ride.  What a sweatfest! I will admit that I did not grab one of the Lasko Performance series fans that I typically use, so I was a bit under cooled but that was not the reason for the excessive sweating.  The intensity was the main culprit.  

I am quickly learning that selection of the event and the category you enter is key to the success of the ride goal.  My goal for today’s ride was to get 75 minutes of seat time in and a little bit of intensity. It turned into 85 minutes (warm up and cool down included) and nearly 80% of my ride was spent above my 200W average goal.  OOPS!

So, What would I have changed?  I called an audible 5 minutes before the ride and went from the “B” group ride to the “A” group ride.  As I rode perfectly fine in this group ride, it did not meet the purpose of my workout. In hindsight it may have been wise of me to go from the B’s to the C’s and have an easier day that I could push if I wanted.  Unlike the road racing and cyclocross scene I grew up racing in, I am gradually learning, one ride at a time, that the categorization does not really matter as much as the goal of the workout. Swallow your pride Brady!
One little fact that I learned out of necessity (yep, didn’t have my Wahoo in “indoor” mode so I had a 5 second file…ROOKIE MOVE!) is that, if you do not have your Zwift account linked to your TrainingPeaks, Strava or other account, you can download your workout in a .FIT file so that you, your coach or your Strava Social crowd can view, analyze and the Strava family can taunt your effort.