Just curious what people use to supplement a long outdoor ride when the weather/motivation drives you to stay indoors?
I’m sure 3 hrs around Watopia is easy enough, but was curious if anyone used something more structured.
I like to pick one of the longer pre-planned routes in Zwift for my longer base rides. That way there is a clear goal at the end (ie. finishing the route). The other option is to do one of the organized group rides (I find people chatting as a welcomed distraction to make the hours pass faster).
I’ll go with one of the longer routes with some climbing, take on Alpe du Zwift at a casual pace or look for a 2 hour group ride. Also if you haven’t gotten them already there are a few Zwift badges for completing 5, 10, and 25 laps of the Volcano Circuit in one go which will keep you busy for a day!
Excellent! Thank you both
I actually just love riding the hills in Watopia, whatever they are, and occasionally tagging along an overtaking rider for a short or long stretch. It’s a lot of fun, actually - the main thing you have to worry about is going too HARD, which is a nice surprise given the typical monotony and dread that one gets with hard trainer efforts.
I friggin’ love Zwift - for me, the group racing and structured workouts are great, but the thing I find I enjoy more than anything else is to just be able to ride the roads and hills in an open-ended way much the way you’d do outdoors (at least on my nonstructured days, which are become scarce due to upcoming races…)
I use PerfPro and it has a huge library of workouts including some Sufferfest stuff if you have the videos.
In the past I have resorted to using the ST indoor workouts back-to-back with pre-programmed Zwift sweet-spot workouts all with the intensity turned down to 90%. Keeps things a bit more interesting and turning down the intensity means you don’t get cooked over the longer durations.
Always Zwift for me.
I join a long group ride that I can comfortably stay with and then offer my services as sweeper/keeper. 100km passes pretty quickly when you are keeping an eye on the back markers, sending messages and dropping fairly often to pull people back up to the group. I’m a fairly middle of the pack cat B racer at the minute, but I’ll usually join something like the 3R cat C 100km ride on a Sunday morning and help out as above. Easy z2 riding for the most part with some efforts to keep it interesting.
Otherwise I’ll join a cat B 100km ride and try and hang on for 2 1/2 hrs at 3 - 3.5wkg.
If you have an Edge 520 or similar bike computer than can control your trainer, download a course from Garmin connect to your device and ride it.
I have also made a couple interesting rides via Training Peaks to keep it real.
