Today I broke down and bought a subscription to the additional metrics at the Power Zone Pack website. This is something I said I would not do when I first signed up. The data from the bike and my Garmin was enough and I did not feel the need to spend any more money just to see the “blue line” on my charts.
I am now entering the final week of a 6-week PZP challenge and on Wednesday, if all goes well, I will once again take the FTP test ride.
In the meantime, however, I wanted to take advantage of the sale on the annual subscription. That, and I am a total sucker for data.
The first thing I did after subscribing was to pull up this 45-minute PZ Max ride with Denis Morton. This is a ride that I took by mistake. The challenge ride that I was supposed to take was actually a PZ endurance ride, something that was meant to be much less stressful on the legs. I read the date wrong and ended up doing this ride, which was following two previous days of intense rides. I am equally shocked and surprised that my legs and lungs held up. Perhaps a testament to this type of training. This ride was called the “bear claw ride” because of the claw-like image in the graph. Working up to zone 4, which I completely hate, I spent some time and then would sprint into zone 6. Rather than drop down to a lower zone for recovery, I stayed at zone 4. Those intervals were so tough for me. I have not had the chance to look at my graph and see how I did (black line) compared to what I should have done (blue line). I feel more comfortable recovering in zone 2, it seems since I did not drop down zone 1 for the duration of the recovery between the zone 4/6 efforts.
I felt like an idiot when I found out that this was the wrong ride. I still feel accomplished for getting through this one, though.
With the new watch, I also have some additional data available to me to geek out on. For example, I can now see training effect and exercise load. This is all new to me and I am wrapping my mind around how best to use the information. It is great to see how Garmin estimates the impact of each activity and how balanced the training is going.
