The first of the VTTA Zwift time trial series was preceded by a 'test event' that I missed. So I came at it a bit cold, not having done a Zwift TT in nearly a year. The TT was on the nearly pan-flat Tempus Fugit course. This is really quite unrealistic as even on the flattest real life courses there are minor undulations and variations in wind resistance that make the ride a bit more variable than in a virtual world like Zwift.

Anyway, I made the most stupid error (especially given the decades of TT experience I have), and shot off at the start at a completely unsustainably power. Subsequently I was all over the place power-wise and faded really badly towards the end. I could see my average power dropping...I finished in 24:20 (I think), with an average power of 232W. Apparently this was good enough for 7th place on Age Adjusted Time (so I am told). Maybe the re weren't many VTTA members taking part!

I started using Zwift after recovering from my first (and so far only) bout of Covid at the outset of the first UK lockdown in spring 2020. At that time I was working from home and I settled into a routine of riding Zwift before and after each working day, with a significant impact on my fitness. I remained a home-worker until I retired in 2023, but I kept using Zwift along with some other virtual platforms after that.

For me, Zwift has generally been a bit of a solitary activity. I did try a couple of meet-ups with work colleagues, and took part in the VTTA Zwift time trial series last January, but really I'm just there on my own in the garage.

The New Years Day '10' is a regular event in the North Bucks Road Club calendar of events, and one that I am generally keen to turn out for. Unfortunately over the last few years, my attendance has been spotty to say the least. I ddn't ride in 2023 owing to a family emergency, and I didn't ride in 2024 owing to a hideous respiratory cold (not Covid, at least!).

One of the frequent problems with winter events it the likelihood of bad weather. This year was particularly bad, and while we were optimistic owing to the larger than usual number of entries (11, including a many from a local Triathlon club), as I was monitoring the forecast over the last week, as New Year's Day drew closer I was seeing rain, then sleet, then snow, then finally strong gusts of wind combined with heavy rain.

As usual I've gone into Christmas week with an eye on the club's New Years Day '10'. Also as usual, the travelling and generally trying to be sociable, has disrupted things along with not sleeping too well. The NYD '10' was one of the events that I set in Athletica.ai training plan as a target event, and it'll be the first real test of my fitness. I am still funneling workouts into TrainerRoad, and my AI estimated FTP has jumped a whapping 2W to 251W since I started with Athletica.ai. That might reflect better progress than it seems since having an increasing FTP in one's mid-60s could be rather good.

In other news, I added a second A race to my schedule, the Duo Normand, reinstated to the calendar for the first time since Covid did away with the 2020 edition. At least this event is on a Sunday and can be properly entered in the Athletica.ai calemdar, unlike events not on a weekend (almost all of the North Bucks Club events are on Wednesdays). This is actually pretty poor feature of Athletica.ai, but I suppose only a few mid-week events are likely to be key events in my season.

I’ve now been using Athletica for a few months. While the indications I see on form via intervals.icu are nothing but positive, I reckon the proof will be in performance on the ground in the New Year’s Day ’10’ - about 6 weeks away. Here's a banner from Athletica, proclaiming "Train Smarter, not Harder". Does the app live up to that billing? Read on...

The whole training plan seems rooted in science - every so often I see a link to a publication or at the least an athletica blog article. This makes the app seem much less of a black box than, for example, TrainerRoad. There is a regularity about the training plan: each week has a recovery session; a 30:30 short HIIT session; a Threshold session of 4m intervals set at several watts above threshold; two tempo/sweetspot sessions, one of which is at higher gear/lower cadence as a strength training session. Interspersed are endurance sessions, often long enough that I’d prefer to do them outdoors. I’ve also noted that while I sometimes struggle to complete sessions (particularly the Threshold sessions), I am more able to do so than I was with TrainerRoad. Every few weeks, there are threshold and power profile tests scheduled. I’m unsure how these play out in terms of fine-tuning the various parameters, but as far as I understand it, the system looks at the power profile graph as a whole (or maybe specific points along the chart).

Well, I’m about 6 weeks in to my Athletica.ai subscription. So far it’s been pretty impressive, and here are some observations.

I’m seeing a kind of regularity between each week’s workouts. Generally speaking, there’s a sweetspot workout, a strength/endurance trainer workout, a short interval HIIT workout and a threshold workout. These are supplemented by one or two longer endurance workouts, which I generally try to do outdoors.

Since the beginning of 2024 I've been increasingly using the Rouvy app in my indoor bike training (see Indoor Training - Part 3 Rouvy vs Zwift and Fulgaz). Until the other day I'd only been using this to enliven my indoor cycling on otherwise very dull interval sessions, but I thought I ought to give Rouvy's workouts a bit of a try. And I'm rather impressed.

The Rouvy website has a very clear description of how this all works. So I needn't offer more than a few comments, based largely on using Rouvy on the AppleTV.

Recently I'd become interested to see how the power reported by my ageing Tacx Neo smart trainer (first generation) compares with my Assioma pedals (i have the dual set). My initial investigations involved fitting the Assiomas to the bike mounted on the turbo and comparing the reported power by eye. This seemed to have a significant different at least at some power levers, so I felt some further investigations were merited.

I came across intervals.icu a couple of years ago, via an article written about 2021 Olympic road race winner Anna Keisenhofer. In the article she noted the complex and adaptable graphics that intervals.icu delivers, based on data drawn in from a number of sources.

Part 3 of this series is somewhat delayed by Christmas and associated shenanigans such as the traditional Christmas Cold, which really flattened me for a couple of weeks.

In Part 1 I described the hardware I use for cycle training indoors. In Part 2 I’ll describe the principal software package I use for indoor training, TrainerRoad. Part 3 will cover the other software I use, and Part4 the software I use for monitoring my progress (with some hardware comments).

There's a wide variety of apps out there for use with smart trainers. For some of these I'll only give a brief description in Part 3, while others I'll keep my comments very brief as I haven't used them extensively enough to form a valuable opinion.

This is the first in a short series of posts in which I discuss my approach to training for cycle time trials. I find road cycling to be unsuitable for structured training sessions other than extended endurance sessions, due to a combination of climbs and descents (albeit pretty small around here), junctions, traffic lights and of course motor traffic. The exception to that would be the evening 10 mile time trials the club offers through the season, which provided an opportunity for riding at a high sustained pace for 20+ minutes.

In part 1, I’ll give a bit of background to the kit I use.