So I’ve been using Zwift for a few weeks now and according to my online stats on the Zwift app I’ve ridden 262 miles, climbed 24,300 feet and burned 27 slices of pizza. To be honest I’m not entirely sure of the relevance or meaning of that last stat, but burning virtual pizza slices seems to be an important Zwift achievement so who am I to argue.

Feeling like I had a handle on this whole Zwift thing now, I was ready to take my Zwifting  up a notch. It was time to explore the ‘training’ sessions, but before I could do that Zwift needed to know my FTP or ‘Functional Threshold Power’ so it knew how hard to make the workouts. Theres loads of stuff about FTP tests out there on YouTube and the internet. It’s basically the most power you can sustain for a twenty minute period before you either blow up, fall off your bike or revisit you breakfast. It seems up to a few months ago to have been the new holy grail of training programs. Everybody seemed to be both obsessed with what their FTP was and determined to improve it. It was suddenly the only figure that mattered and much had been written and postulated on how understanding this new magic number was reached and how it could be improved, and improving ones FTP was the sure and certain way to transforming everybody’s performance and fitness.

More recent thoughts seem to be that in fact FTP may not be the magic bullet of cycling training,  and obsessing about whatever number is spat out by the various ways of testing to see what yours is can in fact be counter productive for a lot of riders. The debate rages on internet forums, YouTube channels and club run cake stops, but that’s for another time. Zwift still uses FTP to tailor its workout mode so I’m just going to have to knuckle down and take the dreaded FTP test. In preparation for the ordeal to come I watched a couple of YouTubers put themselves through it in the name of entertainment and it looked truly horrific. Suitably apprehensive I bib-shorted up and clipped in one morning after the wife and kids had left for work and school so they wouldn’t be alarmed at the probable sounds of distress coming from the back room.

It was as horrific and painful as the on-line videos had made it look. The warm up alone before the key 20 min effort left be rubbery legged and struggling to keep to the power and cadence demands on the screen. The actual FTP part of the test was a true lesson in suffering, and actually really quite difficult to get right. The theory is simple – ride as hard as you can for 20 minutes, I mean how hard can it be? In reality it’s actually quite a difficult thing to judge. Do you go off hard and try to hang on? or do you try to pace the first 15 mins and then empty the tank in the last 5 to try to get the average power up? I opted for ‘go quite hard then see how you feel later on’. Unfortunately, my ‘go quite hard’ was obviously too hard as I just had nothing left in the legs as the clock ticked remorselessly down. Rocking from side to side with sweat and snot dripping all over my top tube I watched as the power I was putting out ebbed away as the end of the 20 minutes came closer. I certainly emptied the tank, (and almost my stomach) but I staggered off the bike feeling as if I hadn’t paced the test very well at all. Or maybe I am just in lousy shape. The final result? 174 watts or 2.32 watts per Kilo which puts me firmly down towards the bottom of the stats for my age group and weight. in the ‘untrained’ category as one website rather unkindly I thought labelled me.  However, the test was done, Zwift now knew exactly how bad the raw material it had to work with was and I could try some workouts, after all with such a meagre FTP they surely couldn’t be that hard could they?

Wrong, so wrong. I’ve tried three different training workouts now and they have all tested me to the absolute maximum of my capacity to suffer, and hanging on and suffering is and was prehaps my biggest strength as a rider. I’ve always been good at hanging on and blocking out the pain and this masochistic ability to go into the red has always allowed me to punch above my real fitness level on the bike, but all that being said each of these workouts saw me getting to the end of the final interval glassy-eyed and praying for the end. Using FTP as a measure of your fitness can and will be continued to be debated by many experts and riders but all I can say is the way Zwift uses it to tailor the workouts seems to be pretty accurate. What it asked of me was just about the maximum I could deliver over the duration of the ride.

Will it make me faster though? well I hope so. It certainly keeps you working much harder than you would on a usual ride and the highly structured nature of the workouts and the wealth of information on the screen is certainly going to satisfy the data obsessed rider’s amongst us. Theres also several training programs included on the Zwift workouts page which have different aims such as preparing a novice rider for their first race or 100km Sportive which can be followed over the span of a few weeks as well as the standalone rides. There really is something for everyone, well everyone that’s willing to put themselves through the dreaded FTP test……..

I won’t be using it every ride though, sometimes its just better to set your own pace and go wherever the virtual road takes you instead of turning yourself inside out trying to maintain 195 watts uphill for the next two minutes, but is certainly another arrow in the Zwift quiver for keeping their users engaged and feeling like their getting their monies worth for their monthly subscription.

Go on give a Zwift workout a try if you havent already (I recommend the GCN climbing ones as a particularly painful way to start), prepare to suffer, but in a strangely enjoyable way …… (as the actress said to the bishop :-)……)