For this morning’s climbing ride I took on Tacx Software’s Yorkshire Dales Stage 1 – Nidderdale ride.
Heads up: I mucked around with my video capture settings for this ride, in the hope that I could eliminate the OBS encoder overloaded error. Alas, no. I have only succeeded in making the final recording awful quality. That said, I did not suffer any drop outs / stuttering at all. I guess it’s either awful quality and capture everything, or better quality and lose most of it.
Arghhh!!!
On thing I realised during this ride is that each of the “Next Climb” climbs (as pointed out by the Tacx HUD) are actually marked on the ride graph. You can – hopefully – make these out from the blurry screenshot above. There are 4 marked climbs on this ride – each has a blue underline.
I thought this was quite a cool feature.
This ride was billed as moderate difficulty, and here’s what the ride blurb had to say:
An easy rolling hills ride through Nidderdale starting in Constable Burton and finishing in Pateley Bridge where you can continue the ride with Stage 2 that will take you along past the Gouthwaite Reservoir and over the tough climb of Lofthouse.
Tacx blurb for England, Yorkshire Dales Nidderdale – Stage 1
I’m not sure I agree with the easy statement above. This wasn’t flat. To me, only flat is easy. And even then… it’s never easy.
Knowing what I know from previous Tacx rides, I had fore-warmed my legs with a 10km Zwift session. This was handy, as right away we jumped into Constable Burton climb. It wasn’t long, but in places the gradient percentage was well into the teens.
This was a common occurrence through three of the four climbs. Short, but sharp.
And as above, I’m not sure that constitutes an easy ride.
The scenery was top drawer.
I’m really looking forwards to the British spring and summer seasons in 2020 as I desperately want to get out and about on the country roads near me. This ride reminded me very much of the local routes I plan to take – particularly around Beacon Fell, Longridge, and Chipping, near where I live.
I’ve said this before, but I will say it again:
I’m not a huge fan of rides that are a bit “roller coaster-ish”. By which I mean they are constantly going up and down, requiring frequent gear changing, and the technical aspect of ride management.
For me, that just doesn’t give a consistent workout. Maybe I’m spoiled by Zwift. Maybe it’s my own fault for doing a ride like this in the first place.
It’s a little misleading thinking there were only four climbs on this ride. There were several “unmarked” climbs, by which I mean short but steep inclines that had to be navigated.
In several of these I was caught off guard, either finding myself grinding in the wrong gear, or frantically – and with a completely lack of timing – trying to shift into an easier gear, only for the little roller to come to an end as quickly as it had arrived.
There was a large section of the first third of this ride where I was stuck behind two fellow cyclists.
I say stuck behind, but clearly the cyclist who was filming the ride had it well within his or her capability to drop these two like a stone. Even so, it was nice to be alongside some fellow cyclists, even if in real life I would highly likely stood no chance of keeping up with them. I knew this from the fact that the video was playing slowly enough to see that their cadence was not as it should be.
More than anything this route reminded me of Zwift’s Yorkshire route. Of course, this is because they are both Yorkshire… but the route seemed so similar, familiar somehow. I’m not sure any part of the Zwift route was covered, but certain tell tale signs – cows, and tractors – were out in abundance.
Also, it was as up and down as Zwift’s Yorkshire map, that’s for sure.
Three of the climbs were short and sharp. The first two (Constable Burton) and this one, Thorp Road were too far for me to sprint, but not far enough for me to get any kind of rhythm going. I wouldn’t say I struggled with them, but I didn’t do particularly well on either.
I wanted this ride to be less of an intense climbing Sunday. I think I achieved that with this route choice. Perhaps a better option might have been to have a route that was largely flat, but with one longer, more difficult climb?
Always easy to say in hindsight.
During this climb, the video recording rider managed to drop both of the cyclists I had spent so long behind. Aside from staring at their backsides, I was gaining no benefit from being behind them. I guess Zwift has spoiled me, with its drafting feature.
However, that said, I of course do get a better workout when I have to do all the hard work for myself.
Some of the unnamed climbs on this route were brutal. The one above, for example, peaked out around 17%. I can’t understand why this was billed as an easy ride. I’d put it down at moderate at the very least.
Now what happened for me, unfortunately, on this ride was that I began to run out of time.
I’d started the day quite late. Waking up at 7.30 was something of a luxury – over the 6.30am for the other 6 days of the week. I hadn’t intended to sleep in, but woke with a banging head ache.
It took a while for the paracetamols to kick in, and up until this point the prospect of doing an intense climb … or really any bike activity at all, wasn’t that appealing.
By the time I got on the bike, it was just after 10am, and my New York warm up lasted a further 20 minutes.
After this I mucked around with OBS for a while, set up some tunes for the ride, all the usual palava. By the time I was properly underway, it was after 10:50. I figured I’d have loads of time before 12:30 when I absolutely needed to be off the bike, fed, and out of the door.
Alas, no.
By the time I got to the bottom of Skelding Moor I still had over 30 minutes on my ETA for the end of the ride, and by this point I’d been on the bike near an hour already. If I kept up this pace I’d have about 10 minutes to get off, sort out the end of ride activities, shower, eat, dress, and be out of the house.
The pace needed quickening.
Hitting the bottom of Skelding Moor I dropped gear into the little ring ready for the climb.
This turned out to be a longer, more grindy affair. Not so steep, just rather meandering up … and up. At quite a slow pace, as it happens.
I’ll touch on this in the weekly review, but honestly, this week I just feel thrashed. I’ve recovered – physically at least (I think) – from the FTP test, but mentally I’m still struggling to ride at a harder intensity.
Hitting the top of Skelding Moor took a further 10+ minutes, and worse, when I did make the top of the climb, I went to get back into the big ring and managed to derail entirely. Absolute fail, and after getting off, getting the chain on, washing my hands, and then remounting, I’d lost another few precious minutes.
Fortunately by this point only one last climb remained. Combe Ridge lay looming ahead, clearly visible even from over a kilometer away. The screenshots don’t really do it justice, sadly.
Thankfully it was fairly short. I don’t remember the exact distance, but I figured I could likely smash it out of the saddle.
Well, even in the little ring (once again), I didn’t make it all the way to the top out of the saddle. Almost, but not quite.
I’d had to go a little harder than I would have liked in the run up, trying to keep a higher wattage in order to burn down the remaining ETA as quickly as possible.
The truth is, after 700+ calories burned, about an hour and half on the bike, and after the fairly high intensity week I’ve had, this was just about the maximum I could handle to see me out for the week.
Done and dusted – unfortunately no times to share, one thing the Tacx software doesn’t provider – it was pretty much all down hills from this point on.
Even so, this still took me about 4 or 5 minutes, which I really didn’t have.
By the end of the ride, the house was in mayhem, kids to feed and dress, stuff to put in the car, the full works. Not what you need after near 50km total ride and 700m+ of climb. I just wanted to lay down.
Instead I ended up showering, shoving food in my face, nearly throwing it all back up, and thankfully, actually making the kid’s scheduled Christmas train activity. Result.
I think I’ve said all I want to say about the ride for today.
I am really enjoying the Tacx software video rides. If only I could figure out how to record them properly, we could all enjoy them equally 🙂
OK, I’ll leave everything else up to the weekly review.
Until then, ride on!
warmup 