I used to have a love-hate relationship with indoor training. Over winter, when I used to race ‘cross, I was pretty religious about commuting home from work, then hopping straight on my basic, wheel-on trainer for an hour or so of intervals, with nothing to go on but a stopwatch, a resistance dial, and a heart rate monitor.
For reasons I’ve gone into before, I used overtraining as a handy veil for what basically amounted to an eating disorder, and so I don’t massively look back on this time of my riding life with a great deal of fondness, to the point that I avoided indoor training entirely for many years.
Last year, I finally relented, thanks primarily to the offer of a comped subscription to Zwift and the need to actually review some indoor hardware. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was enjoyable, but I muddled through a handful of sessions and tried to convince myself that racing a random Finn up a pretend volcano on a screen was somehow a substitute for going outside.
This year, though, I’ve come to realise that I don’t want a virtual world. I just want the ease of my basic, wheel-on trainer and some simple interval sessions, but no matter what I try to do to facilitate this, I run into the same painful headaches.
I don’t know my FTP
With my free Zwift membership over, I scratched around for a solution that best represented my needs, and happened upon the Elite Zona, a bar-mounted control pad that allows one to select a workout zone, which directly communicates with one’s smart trainer to change the resistance level to the required level. “Sounds perfect”, I thought to myself, before realising I didn’t know my FTP, which was necessary for the Zona to set the zones correctly.
I had my old one from Zwift, but that was a year old, and I’d got a lot fitter in the intervening time thanks to an old injury dissipating. Off to MyWhoosh I went, given it was free, and set about doing an FTP test, which I had to do twice as the first one started at a default, low baseline meaning I maxed out the ramp test, so that was two evenings wasted before I could even use the Zona, but eventually I succeeded in distilling my value as a rider down to a number. (a paltry 259, if you must know).
Once I’d plugged this into the Zona, I could then happily use it to ride at…
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