Virtual City Limit Sprints.
Zwift's Watopia Island course only has a couple designated sprints. One's longer than the other and they're in more or less the same location in opposite directions. One takes me a little less than 11 seconds to finish, the other takes me about 25 seconds. A pretty good loop of the island takes me about 15 minutes, give or take. So, if I only went for the established sprints during a loop of the island, I'd be sprinting about 4 times an hour.
The problem with this is that is doesn't help to develop a faster recovery from hard efforts. Chugging around at Zone 3, sprinting, then chugging around at more Zone 3 just isn't a great way to train for crits. It's more like a good way to train to get dropped. I don't need to train for that, because I'm already performing at an elite level when it comes to not being able to keep up. As I get older, it becomes harder and harder to bounce back from a big effort. By "big effort", I mean a lot of flailing and grunting, but not a lot of extra speed.
What I need to do more of is hard flailing for a given interval (say 30 seconds), followed by adequate recovery (recently measured in days), and then repeat for a bunch of times until my heart stops. This gives you the ability to respond to attacks and counter-attack... or so I've heard. I've always stopped after the response and then used any remaining energy to profanely berate the individual trying to ruin our civil little race.
At any rate, I've tried to look at ways to reduce the recovery intervals a bit and pack in more flailing. Initially I started picking random landmarks on Zwift and sprinting from one point to another. Any rock, bush, or sign would do. I'd link two or three into a loop along with the regular sprint point. I'm not sure if anyone else was sprinting between these two points, since I don't use Strava, so I don't know how I'd stand up against other bored fat guys. I can't imagine there's a stretch of road anywhere and of any length, real or virtual, not segmented in Strava and jealously guarded by someone. I'm not racing them, so I prefer to remain ignorant of where the bar is set. In my case, it's set pretty low.
The problem with these random sprints is that, unlike with a group ride city limit sprint, you don't have any idea how you stack up because there's little chance anyone is going for the same segment and there's no way to tell who is faster. Without the timer that the established sprints have, it's very hard to know if a specific flail was any faster or slower than the last flail. All you know is whether or not the flail hurt, and since most of my body hurts these days, it's not the best indicator of performance. Analysis after the fact only shows you should have thrown in the towel after the fifth flail instead of progressing to the thirteenth.
So I started going for established sprints, blowing up for a couple minutes, then turning around and trying the other direction. By the third sprint, I'm usually dreading the impending effort. I think that means it's working. It's also incredibly boring seeing the same landmarks over and over. When I can't sprint anymore, I usually try to recover enough to grind out the rest of the workout. Usually it's pretty pitiful.
Of course, I have to remind myself that not every workout should be a flail workout. I have to fight the urge to sprint as I approach the line, and to stick with whatever 'meh' wattage I've been cranking out. It's hard though, because sprint efforts are quick and painful, with an easy recovery period afterwards. TT intervals are long, mindless grinds where your muscles slowly twist into pretzels and you dump gallons of sweat onto the floor. Since I have the attention span of a squirrel, I prefer to get my pain over with quickly. Yet I know those protracted sweating sessions are good for me, so I force myself to do them.
Like the group ride city limit sprint, a Zwift sprint is meaningless- even if you get to wear a pretty green jersey for an hour. The effort is what matters. It's building towards something. Maybe that something is a result in a race that nobody ever cares about. Maybe it's an overuse injury. Whatever it is, each sprint piles on top of the last one, and the real reward doesn't come from the virtual admiration of some guy in Madagascar in the form of a "Ride On". I'm only on Zwift making myself sweat so I can hang onto the drafts of my genetic superiors for a little while longer. Maybe they'll screw up and I can sneak around them at the end with my pre-pubescent top end power.
You never know, and you can always dream.
The problem with this is that is doesn't help to develop a faster recovery from hard efforts. Chugging around at Zone 3, sprinting, then chugging around at more Zone 3 just isn't a great way to train for crits. It's more like a good way to train to get dropped. I don't need to train for that, because I'm already performing at an elite level when it comes to not being able to keep up. As I get older, it becomes harder and harder to bounce back from a big effort. By "big effort", I mean a lot of flailing and grunting, but not a lot of extra speed.
What I need to do more of is hard flailing for a given interval (say 30 seconds), followed by adequate recovery (recently measured in days), and then repeat for a bunch of times until my heart stops. This gives you the ability to respond to attacks and counter-attack... or so I've heard. I've always stopped after the response and then used any remaining energy to profanely berate the individual trying to ruin our civil little race.
At any rate, I've tried to look at ways to reduce the recovery intervals a bit and pack in more flailing. Initially I started picking random landmarks on Zwift and sprinting from one point to another. Any rock, bush, or sign would do. I'd link two or three into a loop along with the regular sprint point. I'm not sure if anyone else was sprinting between these two points, since I don't use Strava, so I don't know how I'd stand up against other bored fat guys. I can't imagine there's a stretch of road anywhere and of any length, real or virtual, not segmented in Strava and jealously guarded by someone. I'm not racing them, so I prefer to remain ignorant of where the bar is set. In my case, it's set pretty low.
The problem with these random sprints is that, unlike with a group ride city limit sprint, you don't have any idea how you stack up because there's little chance anyone is going for the same segment and there's no way to tell who is faster. Without the timer that the established sprints have, it's very hard to know if a specific flail was any faster or slower than the last flail. All you know is whether or not the flail hurt, and since most of my body hurts these days, it's not the best indicator of performance. Analysis after the fact only shows you should have thrown in the towel after the fifth flail instead of progressing to the thirteenth.
So I started going for established sprints, blowing up for a couple minutes, then turning around and trying the other direction. By the third sprint, I'm usually dreading the impending effort. I think that means it's working. It's also incredibly boring seeing the same landmarks over and over. When I can't sprint anymore, I usually try to recover enough to grind out the rest of the workout. Usually it's pretty pitiful.
Of course, I have to remind myself that not every workout should be a flail workout. I have to fight the urge to sprint as I approach the line, and to stick with whatever 'meh' wattage I've been cranking out. It's hard though, because sprint efforts are quick and painful, with an easy recovery period afterwards. TT intervals are long, mindless grinds where your muscles slowly twist into pretzels and you dump gallons of sweat onto the floor. Since I have the attention span of a squirrel, I prefer to get my pain over with quickly. Yet I know those protracted sweating sessions are good for me, so I force myself to do them.
Like the group ride city limit sprint, a Zwift sprint is meaningless- even if you get to wear a pretty green jersey for an hour. The effort is what matters. It's building towards something. Maybe that something is a result in a race that nobody ever cares about. Maybe it's an overuse injury. Whatever it is, each sprint piles on top of the last one, and the real reward doesn't come from the virtual admiration of some guy in Madagascar in the form of a "Ride On". I'm only on Zwift making myself sweat so I can hang onto the drafts of my genetic superiors for a little while longer. Maybe they'll screw up and I can sneak around them at the end with my pre-pubescent top end power.
You never know, and you can always dream.
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