I’ve decided to take a bit of time away from running. Not completely cold turkey, and if I feel in the mood for a run, I will. But the last few weeks have been plagued with a minor heel injury and some mild illness, as well as a fairly inconsistent schedule. That inconsistent schedule is going to continue for at least one more week, and that has meant that settling into a routine of running has been a challenge. Motivation has also been a challenge. My next Marathon is in April but I have no performance goals for that event. I want to be fit enough to enjoy it, but the training block won’t start until the New Year. I could try to find a short-term goal, but nothing has captured my imagination, at least not from a running perspective.
By contrast, Zwift has really captured my attention. I’ve been able to train even when my heel is hurting, and on days when I have been feeling under the weather, rather than facing actual weather I can stay indoors and take things nice and easy.
Or indeed not so easy. I felt pretty rough on Friday. I already had Saturday planned as a recovery day in case I had a few drinks at our work Christmas meal, so even though I only had a couple of drinks all night, Saturday played out in a similar fashion. I felt a lot better than I did on Friday, but other than a few short walks, I did no exercise all day. This morning I was again feeling better, but the cold temperature left me wondering whether a long run was a good idea. I quite often pick up colds in the 48 hours after a long run as a long run does have a short impact on your immune system during your recovery period, and that wasn’t what I needed right now. So I decided to jump on Zwift and load up the Road to the Sky route, which is the shortest route to get to Alpe du Zwift, the Zwift recreation of Alpe d’Huez.
I find it odd that you can’t just start at the bottom of the climb. Of course warming up before you start something like that is very much recommended, but I’d prefer to have complete control over that myself, rather than have a few kilometres of gently undulating roads to negotiate first.
When I did reach the climb, I was glad to have seen the real thing in the Summer. When you see the speeds top cyclists can maintain on a mountain when watching on TV, it can be easy to think that the gradients aren’t particularly significant, an impression often reinforced by the camera perspective. But some of these climbs are just as steep, if not steeper than many of my local climbs, and much, much longer.
Alpe d’Huez is a slightly unusual climb in the sense that the gradients are fairly consistent all the way up. On the plus side, if you are able to settle into some sort of rhythm, you should hopefully be able to sustain that for a while. On the downside, there are no real flat or downhill sections where you can try to recover. If you blow, the rest of the climb is going to be a sufferfest.
When I started today, I didn’t really have a set goal in mind. Alpe du Zwift is a lot longer and harder than any climb I’ve attempted in real life or on Zwift, and since the only reason I was on Zwift today was because of my recent cold, I didn’t want to completely destroy myself. But I also wanted to see how far I could get. Eventually I settled on the idea of doing 30 minutes on the climb, which saw me reach bend 11 (the bends count down from 21).
As a training exercise, today was incredibly useful. The whole 30 minutes felt like a hard effort, which resulted in my FTP rising to over 200W, which was a figure I barely dropped below across that 30 minutes. Fatigue hadn’t started to impact the power I could produce when I stopped riding, but it certainly wasn’t something I could have sustained for another 30+ minutes. I didn’t really feel like I could have taken things any easier though, so the only way to combat that is to get fitter.
I hadn’t reached the halfway point on the climb, so it is likely that the climb will take me more than one hour. That’s a little daunting, but also useful to know as I can plan how much fuel I need on hand.
But the most useful part of the ride was that it has given me something to aim for. Next weekend I’m planning to go again, maybe pushing to 40 or 45 minutes and see how far that takes me. Then at some stage before Christmas, I want to try to do the whole climb. The good thing about the Alpe du Zwift climb is that it is found in Wattopia, which is always available to ride. Therefore unlike the recreation of Mont Ventoux, which is only available to ride on specific days, I can attempt Alpe du Zwift anytime, so I can wait until I’m feeling good. That goal is much more appealing than trying to reach a certain FTP, even though the training which will get me to that point is basically the same.
Scorpo Stories 