Had I known that Stage 3 of the 7 Days of Tarmac SL7 series would have involved 1200m of climb, on a Saturday, when I first signed up, I maybe wouldn’t have bothered.
But as I didn’t know, and as I’d already done the first two events, it felt wrong not to see this one through to completion.
However, my word, was this an intensive slog.
I could have pushed this one out to tomorrow – make up day – but in the end I just wanted to get it done and over with. And so on the bike I clipped, and with very little in the way of warm up, away I went.
Really this ride was split into two distinct sections.
First there was the “lead in” – about 12km as best I recall, of mostly flat France stuff. Nice enough, and a good way to spin up the legs in anticipation of what was to come.
And then after about 80m of rising and falling, the Petit KOM came into view.
I’ve no idea if my time was any better than my previous attempt at this one.
Frankly, writing this, I’m too tired to go back and check.
It didn’t feel particularly fast.
However, it did feel like I was probably going too hard, too soon.
This was something on the back of my mind anyway, given that today was the fifth consecutive day of riding this week.
However, I’ve been working this week so each ride was shorter than it might otherwise have been.
So, there’s that.
Going into this one I felt kinda fresh, too. I was a bit surprised by this. After yesterday’s ride I expected a touch of fatigue, but nope, I felt decent.
No excuses, then.
With the Petit KOM done, there was no respite between the end of that and the start of the 10% average which lasted for, yep, about an hour.
Nice. (Another place in France, depending on how you pronounce it).
Really I think Zwift missed a trick on this Mont Ventoux climb.
Well, firstly, technically this was not the Mont Ventop route. This was La Reine, which uses the same mountain / route, but misses off the start of the KOM marker line, and ends at least a good few KM’s short of the summit. No complaints from me there. Any less climbing was a good thing in my eyes. And legs.
But the thing is, this climb is … boring.
With a thousand meters of climb to get through, Zwift really should make a little more of the UX here.
The Alpe has the corner markers.
Well, OK, there’s no corners really here.
But there are the kilometre markers.
Why not do the same thing that the Alpe does, but use the kilometre stones instead? I ended up doing this myself, using the Garmin lap function to give myself something to do between blocks.
By the time I was coming to the end of this one I really wanted it over and done with.
As can be seen by the bottom of the screen graph, what I was doing at the very end was to get out of the saddle for a bit – something I don’t tend to do much off – getting up to around 4w/kg, and then sitting back down for a minute or two (closer to two than one, tbf) and recovering then repeating.
This wasn’t to over take people, I just really, really wanted to finish. As fast as possible.
So one really cool thing about this, though not obvious from the screenshot above – but made clear below – is that I managed to be bang on my yearly target for the full hour.
Really proud of this.
I managed to hit my FTP target of 230w or greater back in June but this was over a 20 minute effort.
At the time I was quite unsure I’d be able to hold 230w for a full hour.
Today, however, I managed it. Really, really pleased with this.
I’d have taken the 230w+ FTP as a win. But doing it for the full hour? That’s smashing it for me.
I want to say I’ve enjoyed this series.
That wouldn’t be quite true.
I didn’t enjoy this ride. It was a true slog. I got through it, because I had a motive. Without that, I would never have done this ride today. It just wasn’t enjoyable really.
So the big takeaway is the FTP goal.
If I win the bike, I’d consider that a secondary victory.
No, of course not.
I’d be chuffed as punch. Or whatever.
But I don’t know anyone who has ever won anything on these Zwift challenges, so I won’t be holding my breath.
I think, but am not 100% sure, that I’m going to have a rest day tomorrow.
Got a lot of other rides planned (mentally at least) for the forthcoming week. Should probably give myself a break for a day.
But we’ll see.
