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This is week 9 of 12 in my annual Base training program, but the program has been different this time. Why? Because for the first time in four years of doing this program every year, I’m following it exactly as planned, thanks to my new Zwift Hub trainer with a power meter. Using the Zwift Hub means that the power settings in the training program are exactly transferred into the resistance I feel while riding, making my training smarter than ever.

Discovering the Power of Rest

I’ve felt the ups and downs of training for about the last five weeks. Every three weeks, the training gets progressively tougher, and it’s been a mix of adjusting my bike, watching Harry Potter movies during my longer rides, and learning the importance of taking it easy sometimes. Even in training, taking a light day, which experts call “active rest,” is super important. It’s like taking a break without stopping completely. This helps my body recover and strengthen for the next hard workout.

The Magic of a Power Meter

Having a power meter this year changes everything. Joe Friel and Lynda Wallenfels always talk about how knowing how much effort you put into your training can make a big difference. It’s like having a magic wand that shows you when to push harder and when to back off. This game-changer has ensured I’m not overdoing it or taking it too easy.

Riding Through the Challenges

Every part of this training plan has thrown something new at me, whether adjusting my saddle or finding ways to stay entertained during those longer indoor rides. Harry Potter has been my go-to for keeping things fun on the longer 2 and 3-hour rides. These movies can make time fly by even when my legs are screaming at me to stop.

Learning and Growing

After doing this training plan for four years, having a power meter to follow it precisely has taught me so much more. It’s not just about riding a bike; it’s about listening to my body, understanding what it needs, and enjoying the journey. And the best part? I’m getting better at taking these active rest days seriously, which has been a big lesson this year. Slowing down sometimes is okay, if you don’t stop moving forward.

Looking Forward

With just three weeks left in the plan, I’m excited to see my gains. What’s cool is that I know more about how to train smart, thanks to my power meter and all I’ve learned from Friel and Wallenfels. And even though my Harry Potter marathon is over, the adventure of training and getting stronger doesn’t have to. It’s all about pushing through, taking those rest days when needed, and seeing how far I can go.

Twenty twenty four here we go!

My goals for this year are not quite setup yet. Take this as a rough or first draft:

• Complete Base training program
• Find a few bike races
• Find some epic bike rides
• Fix my front MTB tire
• Follow professional bike racing beyond the major tours
• Continue to improve right ring finger flexion
• Stay healthy

Pretty generic at the moment but it’s 7:35am and I’m still waking up.

What are your goals this year?

One thing to be said for Zwift is consistency. I have ridden for 8 1/2 half hours in the last week. That’s a lot of riding. The fact that I can just come into the basement, throw on my riding clothes, fire up Zwift, and start peddling makes it so easy.

The gaming aspect of Zwift speaks to my 1980s childhood Super Mario Brothers mentality. When I look at most of the ages of other riders in Zwift, they’re usually in my age group if not a little bit older. There’s a lot of commonality with that 1980s vibe and exercising and playing a game, so it works very well. Bravo Zwift.

Back on track, up at 5:30 and on the bike a little after six, feeling good. Did a 10-minute HIIT workout just before the bike ride. It got me warmed up nicely and ready to ride for an hour.

Today’s ride with Bernie went well. I’d say there were 30 or 40 people in the group. Your avatar moves forward based on how hard you are pedaling. However, the left and right turning is handled automatically by Zwift. When you pedal by another rider, if the avatars collide, the game decides if you go right or left around them. When you ride with more than 5 people in close formation, it becomes very curious to see how the game selects who goes where. It’s like watching a school of fish move through the ocean. I am curious if Zwift utilizes the randomness people generate using its system.

Artificial intelligence is a hot topic at the moment. Discussions about using it elevate how we will incorporate it into our lives. The Zwift Robo Pacer is not something I would necessarily consider artificial intelligence. You don’t interact with it beyond the avatar collision avoidance system. It is set to ride a specific tempo, which it holds for the most part. However, it does adjust its tempo based on climbing or descending.

As far as I understand, this is not artificial intelligence but just a programmatic algorithm for adjusting the robot to different gradients. However, to a non-technical person, it might seem like the robot is intelligently adapting to the incline or descent. This is where, maybe, the dangers or concerns of AI come into play. Understanding how susceptible people are to being tricked into thinking something is intelligent when it is just acting intelligent.

It all goes back to our liberal arts education, learning to analyze and think for ourselves.

Slept in again this morning. It’s becoming a bit of a habit. Need to go to bed earlier.

The biggest hassle with an injury is that I have to slow down and let it heal. I like to push myself, and when I’m injured, it’s hard to slow down, but it’s something that I have to do. Sleeping in and going on a slower ride than usual are all good ways to manage being injured. The hand feels pretty good. The splint makes it less useful but also protects it from overuse. I remain patient.

More on zone two training. Zone two training has been around for a long time, and I have talked about it before. It isn’t the most popular way of exercising for several reasons. More common exercises and training plans deal with HIIT and interval training. Both are great ways to get a quick hard workout in and will lead to significant gains quickly. If you’re burning more calories in a shorter period, you’ll lose more weight. You are straining the muscles harder, which will result in muscle mass increase.

The drawback to more intense training is higher rates of injury and overtraining. These are also training in an anaerobic capacity. That means you’re not strengthening the heart to process oxygen more efficiently. You’re also not training the body to burn fat as fuel.

This is where zone two training comes in. The focus is on going slower and easier. This puts you into an aerobic exercise, so you’re burning fat and utilizing your aerobic capacity. You do not reach lactate threshold, where you feel burning in the legs and lungs. Zone two training, you should be able to hold a conversation for the most part. You should be able to talk and keep doing the exercise. That’s one of the best ways to test whether you are in zone two training. During the workout, can you have a conversation? If you can’t, you probably need to slow down. If you can have a conversation without having to take a breath every so often, you might want to go a little more challenging.

You can also track zone two training with your heart rate and power zone levels. Doing this can make tracking where you are during the workout easier. However, your body will get into better shape as you work out. Causing your heart rate zone and power zones to change. If you use either of those methods, you need to make sure that you retest your functional threshold every couple of weeks to months to make sure you’re working in those zones.

Not all of zone two training is done in zone two. About 80% of it should be done in zone 2. The other 20% should be done at zone 4 and higher. This gives you some anaerobic training and is considered enough time to gain the benefits of high-intensity exercise.

My plan for the next few weeks, if not months, is to do zone two training on the indoor bike. One YouTuber mentioned that it is more efficient since it is easier to maintain a specific zone when riding indoors. 60 minutes in zone two indoors is equivalent to 90 minutes of zone two outdoors. So I am already ahead!

Back to Zwift riding with the Bernie Robo Pacer today; not gonna say it’s easy, but it’s more manageable than the Miguel Robo Pacer. I slept in a couple of hours this morning, and it felt great. Usually, I get up at 5:30 AM, but with this hand injury, I really need to let it recover, and sleep is probably the best time that’s happening. It was nice to wake up with the sun already up. That doesn’t happen a lot.

Read an article this morning about cheating in Zwift racing. It’s really easy to cheat on Zwift. One of the most common things is changing the rider weight you have entered in the game settings. The article profiled a Zwift customer who had gotten quite into it during the pandemic and raced a lot. Only to find out that many people were cheating in the races. This led to him getting banned from Zwift for a short time for sharing cheating techniques. After public outcry, he was allowed back on. But then he started getting death threats from cheating riders who didn’t appreciate him talking about their cheats online.

I’ve done a couple of races on Zwift and have placed in the top 20. Were there cheaters? Maybe, but more probably, I’m just not in that great of shape yet. The good news is I don’t take his racing too seriously. I’m not here necessarily to race but to get into shape.

However, I can see the competitive spirit getting involved and upsetting me about someone cheating. Apparently, some Zwift employees left and started a new virtual bike game program to eliminate cheating. It’s still in beta, so I haven’t been able to try it yet.

The catch here is that Zwift once customers. Most Zwift riders are not heavy-duty racers. Speaking of my own usage of Zwift, I would say 90% of the time, I am not racing, maybe even more. So, in the grand scheme of things, Zwift, the company, is OK with looking the other way if people want to cheat and win races. In the end, they’re still getting a subscriber.

With that said, Zwift hosts very high-end elite races; in those cases, they are more stringent about weight settings and equipment used to eliminate or reduce cheating.

The business of virtual indoor cycling. That was not a sentence I ever thought I would write in nonfiction.

I guess I felt rowdy this morning. I upped the pace to D.Miguel who rides at a 1.8 W per kilogram pace. I forgot that little bit at the beginning and wondered why I was working so hard just to try and keep up, but that explains it. There were 100 other riders with me today.

One really nice aspect of indoor riding is being able to focus on your form. Since you aren’t having to pay attention to steering and breaking and all the other things that come with riding outside, you can stay focused on your pedal stroke a lot more.

While it may seem like an obvious thing, you just push the pedals. A pedal stroke is pretty complicated. You have the downstroke then you have the stroke to return the foot back to the top. So there’s a constant flow, and what you’re trying to do is have a smooth pedal stroke all the way around.

There are two drills for improving your pedal stroke. You have one-legged peddling, which is exactly what it sounds like. And you have the fast spin, which is also exactly what it sounds like.

For the one-legged peddling, you unclip your pedal (This can only really be done with clipped-in pedals). Then you try and have a smooth pedal stroke with one leg all the way around. At a slow RPM, this isn’t too bad, but once things speed up, it can become very difficult. The goal is to not have any knocking occur. Knocking is when your pedal stroke loses the smoothness and the freewheel gets a little bit ahead of you. When that happens, and you really gain momentum or pressure on the pedal, it causes a knocking noise as the chain and the freewheel reengage. You only need to do three or four 1-minute-long practice sessions per leg to get the benefits of this exercise.

The fast spinner exercise is where you try and spin your pedals with both legs as fast as possible. The trick to this exercise is to prevent your body from bouncing on your saddle while you’re spinning the pedals. The faster you can spin while keeping your body controlled, the better as it means you’ll be able to transfer more power into the pedals. Again, doing three or four sessions of this will give you benefits.

All that said, I didn’t do any pedal drills today. I just paddled for an hour and sweated. Talk to you tomorrow.

My current exercise plan doesn’t have much of a plan. The problem I’m running into is that most plans have too many interval workouts for what I can do now. So I’m kind of just making it up as I go. Combination of some strength workout in the legs with many zone two to zone one cardio riding.

Zwift has a feature called Robo Pacers, known as RP from here out. These avatars look somewhat similar to the people avatars in Zwift but just slightly different because they look like robots. The RP’s job is to hold a steady pace through a part of the Zwift world, Watopia. As a rider, you use the RP to hold you at a certain speed and effort you want to achieve. This is perfect for zone two rides where you want to stay at a specific power and heart rate.

In the world of Zwift, when you ride with an RP, it is a public ride, so anyone can join. It creates an opportunity for impromptu group rides. This morning, I’m riding with RP, D.Bernie, who tries to hold an effort of 1.5kg/w. The D stands for the category of rider, which is the slowest, with the highest being A. The Bernie part may have something to do with the bot’s nationality, which has a French flag next to it.

We’re currently joined by what looks like at least 50 other riders from all over the world. One setting in Zwift is your nationality; when you choose that, it puts a flag of your country next to your name. Currently, I’m looking at flags from the US, England, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Korea, and others I don’t recognize.

As you ride in Zwift, there’s an opportunity to give a “ride on” to other riders. This is equivalent to getting a Like in Facebook. It serves as encouragement for each other, and it feels nice to get them. When a ride is over, you can see a list of anyone who’s given you would like, and you can then follow them if you want. The social aspect of Zwift is unique in the larger market of virtual indoor cycling.

Got a new phone today for the first time in five years. It’s strange that we call these phones at this point because the last thing I care about using them for is making a phone call. The camera is very nice, I look forward to getting to use that more and more. The screen is very friendly and bright, and I set the font to be very large, and it’s pretty pleasant to read.

One thing that I am very excited about is using dictation on the phone. With the latest iPhone Pros, the system on the chip is doing more Siri processing. This means that the dictation work that it does to understand what you’re saying and make words out of it happens much faster. My limited testing so far is proving this to be pretty awesome. More to come.