Four new routes. 4km of new roads, total, between all four. Oh Zwift, Christmas has truly come early for us this year. Our monthly subs clearly paying for many a late night in the route production studio. Ho ho ho.
Yes, its Christmas time in Watopia. And that means the trees have fancy lights. And this year it also means I have some new routes to check out, stuff to fill in the final few days of my self imposed Advent of Cycling challenge.
Spotting this one – the Ocean Lava Cliffside Loop – with 19km and 146m of climb, it seemed ideal. I’d finished work late (yes, on a Friday, outrageous), but still needed to do something for the day. This looked like as good a ride as any. And a true free ride too, no workout today.
This route covers, I think, the largest section of the new roads added to Watopia in the latest patch.
The new roads take you from the bottom of the mountain start to the Reverse Epic KOM over to the bottom of the mountain start of the Forward Epic KOM.
You can see this new turn off (a graphical marvel) on the first picture below:
The true standout feature of this new route is a huge boulder in the middle of the paved road, forcing you off to a gravel detour.
This section itself is largely flat – it undulates between 0 and 2%, and seemed to last longer than I thought it would. I kept expecting it to end around every bend. I think that speaks more about how fast I think I am in my head, versus how fast I really am in real life.
There are a couple of other nice little touches. The flowery fields near the stone arch, and the little water fall are nice enough.
The rest? Well, there’s a few signs just before the giant boulder indicating rock slides ahead, and there’s a nice enough view of Watopia if you can be bothered changing the camera angles.
But there’s nothing here that wowed me.
What I do like about this route is that it offers something comparable to London’s Box Hill route, which is a nice option to always have available.
The climbing portion of this ride is the S-shaped turns heading up to the reverse KOM, which I think were under used, at least by me. So it’s nice that they will feature more heavily in rotation. It’s also a good excuse to head “that side of the map” without having to commit to either of the bigger climbs.
It was also nice to see the Christmas lights covering the trees.
Those won’t be there all year round, so next time I head this way it might be feeling a little more plain. Or… well, alpine.
I’d set aside ~40 minutes for this route. I ended up doing it faster. I gave it a solid attempt, at least, after my initial warm up.
I’d definitely do this route again. And whilst I don’t think it’s officially covered, it could also be a good one to do in reverse.
This feels like one of the harder rides I’ve done in a while. I was self paced, and managed to cover 410 calories in 36 minutes. To put that into perspective, yesterday’s ride was 1hr and 360 calories.
I’m feeling a touch better today. Legs not quite as aching. Who knows how I’ll feel tomorrow though.
So I have three more new routes to cover, a couple of shorter workouts, and also the two remaining Zwift Academy 2020 workouts to do.
How many of these I’ll get in before the 24th I have no idea. It’s not about lack of want (well, maybe it is in the case of the two brutal looking ZA2020 workouts), it’s more about not killing myself. The 24th can’t come soon enough!
