Three days into the week, and already 5 rides. Phew. Partly this is due to my rather silly attempt at the British Cycling Ride Seven Challenge.
Why this event in particular? My two reasons are really sporting:
- I like the colour scheme of the badge
- I want a badge. Any badge.
It’s frankly quite unlikely I’m going to make it:
I mean, I probably could make it, but I need to rest on at least one of those days, which makes the other two days rides needing to be over an hour and a half each, which seems unlikely.
Once and a bit around Innsbruckring
Innsbruck is one of my favourite maps on Zwift. It was, I think, the very first map I ever tried. Unfortunately I didn’t blog my first two rides, so can’t be absolutely sure. I remember I rode it very early on, and cycled out towards a hill. When I got to the hill, I thought… what the hell is this, and promptly logged off. I couldn’t hack it.
Since then, I’ve only cycled on the Innsbruckring which has two of my favourite things on Zwift:
- A climb
- A sprint
Both of which I am not that great at, but am always trying my best to improve.
First up on each lap of the Innsbruckring is a climb. I’m not sure of the figures, sorry, but it’s at 8% for a while. Quite knackering.
I tried my best to climb the hill at pace. This involved standing up – getting off the saddle – and giving it my best. If anything, I should perhaps of chosen the very hardest gear. As it was, I made it maybe 3/4’s of the way up the climb before having to drop to a much easier gear and feeling quite exhausted.
A good future goal is to climb the hill without sitting down / dropping gear.
After the hill climb, there’s a nice descent towards the sprint. I still haven’t figured out exactly how the minimap works (the top right) with regards to my position – it’s really hard to see on the iPad.
I decided I’d give it my best effort on the sprint.
Happy to have beaten my previous personal best.
Not a huge improvement on the previous week. The one thing of note is last week I rode Innsbruckring / did the sprint (twice) after three rest days. So this feels like an improvement overall.
I leveled up. Now level 9. Doesn’t really mean much to me. In total it’s taken 500+km of riding to get to this level. A major achievement for me, being previously extremely lazy / doing no exercise. Not bad for 7 weeks.
After this I rode out for 15km and then called it a day for two reasons. The first being that I’d run out of time – had to shower and start work. And secondly, my legs feel used. Time for a rest.
Interestingly Zwift has me down as 138w average for this ride, whereas Strava shows me at 156w average. Chris no understand.
Next up for me, I need to book my Tour of Watopia: Stage 3 time. It will almost certainly be 9am Sunday. I will ride again on Saturday for sure, and maybe on Friday night. Not sure yet.
I still seem to have a phantom shift going on in my favourite gear. One to resolve in my down time. The clicking pedal issue has been resolved – just needed to tighten the left pedal. Did I already mention this?
Until then, time for a well earned break. And a bank holiday beer.