For a mental change, I’ve been doing a zwift race on Thursdays every other week. Rather than going into a quick cool down does anyone do any more work afterwards, these are typically replacing a 60 minute sweet spot workout. Maybe a couple of over/unders or sweet spot intervals? TSS of the race is usually around 50, where the workout would have been around 75. I’ve been just riding easy for 25 minutes but that probably isn’t optimal. I guess by default racing itself isn’t optimal to begin with. I’m currently in base.
/thread
Not /thread, just because something isn’t the most physiologically ideal doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing, it’d be much better to do base + every other week Zwift race rather than be bored out of your mind and skip workouts.
To OP, it depends on how closely you want to try to mimic your training plan, how hard you’re going in the race, how long the race is, etc. I’d say if you want to reasonably follow the plan, then take a look at the sweet spot workout that you’re replacing and make a judgement call. If you’re staying under threshold for the race and you’re still at 15TSS less than the workout called for, then go do some sweet spot work after (since you’re replacing a sweet spot workout). If you are going above threshold during the race, then take a look at intensity time and compare that to your workout, you may have already done the amount of intensity the plan called for, and you should just be doing Z2 to fill the extra TSS.
For a race of 50TSS, are you going all out for 25-30 minutes, or are you going under threshold for longer than 30 minutes? Just trying to get an idea of whether you’re doing a very intense threshold/VO2 type effort for a short amount of time, or whether it is more of a sweet spot type race.
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This was last night’s race:
So afterwards I was thinking maybe I should have done some more sweet spot. Instead of spinning around following a robopacer at 1.8 w/kg. Race itself was hard for first 8 minutes and settled down then hard again at end. I’m racing Cat D, so low level.
If you’re reasonably mid-category, most flattish Zwift races tend to turn into tempo or sweetspot over/unders.
Having said that, if I’m doing something extra after a shortish race or a workout; I very usually just jump in with Maria and do an hour or so at 65% of FTP.
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I am doing similar - in that I have put one short Zwift race per week into my programme. I tend to do most of the “filler” beforehand as a warmup rather than afterwards. So for example today, I plan to do a 40 minute warmup (mainly Z2 with some bursts), followed by a 25 minute race and a 10 minute cooldown.
I typically do an interval before the race because the race provides the motivation to go hard. If i do the interval after the race, sometimes its a bit of a challenge to hit the number i want.
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Doing intervals after a race with max efforts is not fun. I would pick a race that has the efforts you need for example longer hills. You can push the hills hard even if you’re dropped.
+1 on this. If I wanted to do a zwift race on a day I’m scheduled for an hour of sweet spot, I’d do ~30 minutes of sweet spot prior to the race and then do the race for fun. That’s assuming you can’t add 30 minutes to your workout time. And if you have the time available to add 30 minutes, just do the scheduled workout and then do the zwift race. Nothing wrong with working in some zwift racing if it keeps you engaged. The race is probably doing more harm (fatigue) than good (adaptation signaling), but all work and no play can lead to burn out (which really hurts training).
Turns out Zwift doesn’t want me racing. I have the Zwift Ride and after 400 miles on it, the handle bar unit failed. Even with sensitivity set to off, the brakes are still on. Can’t turn it off in the software. So they are sending new bars. What’s frustrating is they hid my question about it on their forum, but said it’s a known issue.