WELCOME TO THE 2020 RAPHA FESTIVE 500 WORKOUT SERIES ON ZWIFT

Every year since 2010 Rapha has laid down a festive riding challenge: to ride 500km between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. The #Festive500 might have started in the South of England but, in the ten years since it has grown to become a global challenge and a cumulative of 130 million kilometres were ridden. The challenge is a rite of passage for every cyclist and in the past decade, participation grew steadily reaching over 500,000 participants and 126,000 completions overall.

For the first time, you can do some or all of the F500 challenge on Zwift. To help you get ready for the challenge, Rapha have created the Rapha Festive 500 Workout Series. This offers six structured workouts to help you prepare for the challenge.

Run as group workouts, the focus of the workout series is on improving your endurance, by training in a smart way: plenty of varied efforts in and around Zone 3 (Tempo), suitable for any rider wanting to improve their general fitness and endurance.

ABOUT GROUP WORKOUTS

Zwifters line up in the starting area just like a normal event and once the event starts, workout mode begins. Everyone stays together regardless of power output. That's right, if you're outputting 100W and another Zwifter is outputting 400W you will stay in exactly the same position relative to each other. Only if you stop pedaling and fall 6 meters behind the group will the rubber-banding stop.

ABOUT THIS WORKOUT

In today's workout, you will complete 3 x 12 minute blocks of Zone 3, with some surges thrown in for good measure! The Zone 3 riding should feel nice and comfortable, however the surges may sting a little. The surges in each block increase in intensity, but decrease in duration;
Block 1 - 100% of FTP for 30 seconds,
Block 2 - 110% of FTP for 20 seconds,
Block 3 - 115% of FTP for 15 seconds.

At the end of each 12 minute block, there is a 1 minute 'Free Ride' - depending on your current level of fitness, you can either drop the hammer and give it your max effort, or take some extra recovery. The significant volume of Tempo riding, coupled with the surges will help develop your endurance.

WORKOUT DESIGNER

Matt Rowe is the founder of Rowe & King Coaching (www.roweandking.comOpens a new window) with 25 years of cycling experience, coaching amateur cyclists all over the world to achieve their personal goals.

HELPFUL HINT

We highly recommend doing one of the FTP tests as the estimated FTP can be inaccurate and make the difficulty level of the workouts too high for your current fitness level.
You can adjust the difficulty of the workout mid-ride if needed, by using the up/down arrows on the left hand side, under the workout details.

Find out more about the challenge at rapha.cc/festive500 and don't forget to sign up to the Strava challenge from 1 Dec.

#Festive500 #rcc