Not fancying a structured workout, I was looking for a group ride / event to get stuck in to this morning. But unfortunately I couldn’t find anything suitable.
I did spend ages looking though. And I started looking before I’d connected the turbo or anything, skipping that initial connection screen to get into the list of events and available workouts.
In the end I couldn’t find anything suitable with regards to either a group ride nor any workout, so I opted for the RoboPacer ride on the Island Hopper route in Makuri Islands.
Billed as a C Category ride, things sounded good. ~18km and ~130m of climb per lap, and with Yumi we’d be riding this at ~2.7w/kg, up to 3.2w/kg on the climbs.
Joining the ride, I then realised that I’d not connected anything. Zwift gave me the countdown for 10 seconds of Pedal Assist, in which time I frantically tried to remember how to connect things in game, and also being already clipped into the bike I can barely see the mouse pointer at 4K, so it was never going to end well.
And ultimately it didn’t, because the thing with Zwift’s connection screen is it stops you entirely when you view that screen, even if you’re still pedalling.
So by the time I’d connected my gear I had gotten dropped, and I gave it some beans to try and get back on, but I couldn’t make it.
I realised later why that was – I’d joined right at the top of the Festival Harbor Climb, and so was trying to sprint to catch a group descending. No chance. I’ve been dropped like that in races before, so I took the easy route which was to quite and rejoin.
After that I was coughing like crazy for the first 10-15 minutes of the ride.
It was like a little niggling / scratching feeling at the back of my throat. My wife was off work this week just gone with a chest infection, and I hope I haven’t caught it.
Hopefully it was just because I had the window open and it’s bitterly cold outside. Or something. Anything. Don’t let me be ill, please.
The cough kinda settled down after the first 15 minutes and with that out of the way I planned to do ~30km or 50 minutes, whichever came first.
Turns out they both came at the same time really, and I ended up doing almost two laps.
Around the 30km marker I was already on the Festival Harbor Climb for a second time so decided to stay on and finish that one. We weren’t climbing at race pace so this wasn’t overly taxing.
All in then, a decent ride and a good way to end the week.
I’m a little tired, truth be told. Fatigued, I guess is the proper word for it. Definitely feeling 11 days without a rest now.
Got to be sensible. Pace it. And hope for the best that this stupid cough isn’t anything serious.
