Finally, the Rock has come back…
Wait no, that’s not it. Finally, the PC has been delivered, set up, Windows has been installed and updated, Zwift has been installed, and… *drum roll* I can ride on something that doesn’t look like Minecraft.
I’m not going to harp on about the graphics, but the difference is night and day. I have a proper setup now, exactly what I planned on the day I decided to buy the bike. The PC is essentially a gaming PC with a GTX 970 graphics card, 16gb RAM, and a decent enough CPU. I am really happy with it, and it runs Zwift at 1080p (max res of my TV) at >60fps.
In other words, it’s buttery smooth and looks really nice.
After getting everything set up last night, I didn’t get chance to ride as I needed yet more hardware to be able to do so. Fortunately, I have access to Amazon Prime at the moment, so ordered both a Blue Tooth dongle, and an ANT+ dongle. I just couldn’t be arsed ordering one, or the other, and having either not be right.
It turns out that Zwift’s Blue Tooth support isn’t all that great on Windows. For this ride, I opted for the ANT+ dongle.
I had some trouble though, as I will cover towards the end.
Also on this ride, I got to try out my new shoes and pedals. I will do a separate write up about them, as there’s plenty to say. It was different using proper cycling shoes and clippy pedals. It felt better.
I managed to sneak in a cheeky 30 minute ride whilst my wife and kids were out doing some new-baby related activities. Fortunately, not my new baby.
With London map on rotation, and knowing I had ~30 minutes to ride, I opted for my regular climb of Box Hill. It’s a climb I’ve done plenty of times before, and would be a good test of all my new gear.
There were lots of new things for me on this ride. It’s hard to cover them all. I was feeling great, even with the baking late afternoon heat outside. Not bad considering I’d had a pretty stressful day at work.
For the first few kilometers I’d tried to keep at or around 200w. Then, knowing that the Box Hill climb loomed large ahead, once I turned off over the bridge, I took it a bit easier, readying myself for the effort ahead.
It was truly incredible to see how much better the Surrey Hills looked on the PC. Maybe just enough to take my mind off the start of the Box Hill KOM. Or, maybe not.
Hitting the climb I decided to stick in my favourite gear. Usually I’d end up dropping to the smaller ring on the front, but I resolved to keep on the big ring, and in a fairly low(?) gear, and see how far I could get.
I managed to keep my gearing for the whole climb. This was something of a shock to me, as I really didn’t think I’d be able too. I was really pleased that I had, and I knew my time must be faster than any previous attempt as I’d kept above 180w pretty much throughout. Except for that one screenshot above, of course. 🙂
When I hit the top I’d smashed my previous record by over a minute. Really pleased with this. If anything I was a bit disappointed not to be below 10 minutes. Something to aim for, and I should be proud of that time.
All that remained was for a fairly short and zippy descent back to London town. It’s a fairly gentle coast back in, barring one brutal section where you have to climb back up the underground – a 15% gradient. I used the small ring on that climb, but went fast cadence.
I saw sights on this ride I’d never seen before. The Broom Wagon pub, for example. Nearly Friday, pint tomorrow.
Having put in a solid effort on Box Hill, I was hoping I could put in a new personal best on the London Loop circuit as well. Happy with this. Hopefully at some point I can get this below 30 minutes.
Ok, so now some bad stuff.
Zwift appears to have lost all my stats. No idea why. No idea what the heck is going on with these numbers. It’s not the end of the world. I track these bits of data more thoroughly through Strava and Training Peaks, but still. Bit meh.
I had a bunch of drop outs / data loss points with the heart rate monitor (the Wahoo Tickr) which came towards the very end of the ride when I’d dropped to about 70w for a few km of cool down.
This may be because I’ve switched to ANT+ instead of Blue Tooth. I never had any issues with the tech on my Macbook, or the iPad. Tomorrow I will try using both blue tooth and ANT+ at the same time.
Overall a decent work out. I feel like I had a really good ride. Was a little disappointed to see I’d only averaged 166w, as it felt like more.
Not sure why Zwift has me down as a 60 TSS score versus Training Peaks’ 103 TSS? So odd how the numbers fluctuate between all these different sites.
Anyway, overall really pleased with the new setup. Hopefully I’ll get chance to do a more thorough write up of the new kit over the next few days. It’s going to be a busy time period though, and I can only do my best.