For this morning’s ride I took on Tacx Software’s Etape du Tour 2018 – Col de Romme. This is a 16km ride, of which I think somewhere between 10 and 11km of the distance is uphill. There’s 835m of marked climb, but about 875m in the ride in total.
The average gradient for this one was about 9.6%.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the exact figures, so am having to base this off stats I got post-ride out of Strava.
As ever with my Tacx Software video rides, I ended up with a bit of a video recording disaster. Once more I messed with the settings in the hope that I wouldn’t end up with stuttering footage, or really bad quality footage. Unfortunately I’m back to stuttering footage at this point, so as the ride goes on, I lost more and more of the video recording. Very frustrating.
The truth is: I didn’t ride / do a climb yesterday because I had a real life thing to take care of first thing in the morning, and by the time I got back home I wasn’t in the mood to get on the bike. I resolved to take the day as a rest day and instead, hit the climb I was going to do yesterday as today’s ride.
Here’s the blurb for this one:
The penultimate climb to Stage 10 of the 2018 Tour de France & the 2018 Etape du Tour.
The ride starts on the edge of Cluses & hits the climb after less then 2km. The climb starts hard & stays this way all the way to the top which is where you will find the village of Romme. The toughest part is at the foot where the grades go deep into double figures directly. This ride can be extended with the Etape du Tour 2018 Col de la Colombiere
Tacx Software description for Etape du Tour 2018 – Col de Romme
As you might expect, the ride started out incredibly French. The only time I’ve ever been to France was on a skiing (technically snowboarding) holiday to Tignes. Aside from that I base my French experiences on what I’ve seen on TV during the Tour De France.
Essentially, lots of roundabouts and steep hills.
There was 2km of lead in before we took a very sharp turn to the right, past a Nissan garage and boom, there was the next hours worth of up hill ahead of us.
One good thing about this Col de Romme ride was that the hardest part was up first. The max gradient for the ride was 14%, and we hit that fairly early on. In many ways I prefer this: eat that frog. Get the worst part out of the way as quickly as possible.
I’d added a bunch of opponents on to this ride.
If you’re unfamiliar, Tacx Software has a nice feature whereby you can add previous rider’s performances on to compete against. You can’t see them visually on the video, but you can see them on the left and right HUD elements.
It dawned on me during this ride that perhaps I’d been reading the metrics wrong. I’d added a bunch of riders who were showing average power values for the ride (afaik) at anything from ~140w to 210w.
I was expecting to place somewhere between third and sixth, based on these figures. As it happened, I got steam rolled on this one.
My aim for this ride was not to be overly competitive. I was planning on riding at, or around 200w for the distance. I didn’t manage this.
I was quickly dropped down from 2nd place to 4th place, and slowly but surely, 5th and 6th places caught me, passed me, and dropped me. I was never to catch any of them back up.
Unperturbed, I kept up the pace I was comfortable at. This was around 210w to begin with, but fairly soon I dipped to 200w, then 190w, and that was held for as long as I could, before inevitably I dropped further to 180w.
For whatever reason, I just didn’t have it in me today to push harder. I had reserves left in the tank. I felt decent, both mentally and physically. Aside from a very runny nose, I had no real excuses to fall back on. I just didn’t turn up.
Yet again with the Tacx Software I had trouble with my Wahoo Tickr not being recognised. This seems really hit and miss. I’d have been interested in seeing my heart rate stats for this ride, though would be surprised if I broke 190bpm. This felt like a steady ride, not an intense one.
One thing I often find myself thinking on these French climbs is:
What happens to all the cows when the snow comes?
There are often fields full of cows to be seen off to the left and right. Yet in winter time, the snow fall lasts for months. Do they send them all off for slaughter?
Also, where are the ski lifts?
These are the things that keep my mind busy.
Mentally I went with my usual approach here:
Split the ride into two sections.
There’s the first bit, up to the yellow marker on the graph. And then the second bit is anything after.
I knew the first bit would be the tougher of the two – well, the steeper, at least.
By the time I hit the ~5% stuff half way up, I tried, in vain, to use this point as a place where I could keep pushing and maybe try to catch 5th place back up. Alas, it was not meant to be. And of course, by the time the second half came into play, I’d not had any rest.
Anyway, resting at 5%? That’s the kind of weird thing that happens on these hills. All of a sudden, anything that’s not double digits starts to feel flat. Crazy.
Even though I went into this one with the aim of a non-competitive ride, I couldn’t help myself at trying to keep 7th place behind me.
If I hadn’t had this opponent to keep me pushing, I fear my pace would have slipped yet further. With that in mind, I’m glad I added these opponent riders, purely to use as marker posts for my performance.
Typically I try to do as much of these climbs as possible whilst remaining in the saddle.
Standing up yields short term gains (but not as much as I ever would like), only to completely thrash my legs. I reckon all things being equal, I’d probably be better remaining sat down and continue plodding along at a steady pace rather than trying to push harder and needing to drop off the pace once done, in order to recover.
Mercifully, as we reached the col de Romme, things started to slip into the mid to high single digits. I was out of the saddle for two stints during this time, simply trying to make the pain come to a more immediate halt.
As above, unfortunately the recording went worse and worse as the ride went on, so I did not get the footage from the top of the climb.
Spoiler alert: it’s a car park.
Once we hit the top of the marked climb there was still a little blip of an incline, a mere ~11% or so to enjoy before, finally, some flat(ish) green stuff.
I have to say, whilst I reached the top feeling very tired, I don’t feel I put absolutely everything I had into this ride. This was kinda proven with a 500w smash on the descent…
The point that I was trying to make, if only to myself, is that whilst these climbs are difficult rides, they don’t need to be killer rides.
For me, the solid workout is what matters. I prefer a steady push uphill. Very little flat, and certainly no descents during a climb… that’s just so demoralising for me.
My theory has always been (and will always be): keep the pedals turning, however slowly, and sooner or later you will reach the top.
Disregarding the lovely scenery, this was a really good workout.
I’m glad I’ve put in a climb, even if it came a day late.
It’s almost certainly the last climb of 2019, and possibly the last ride of 2019 at this point. The reasoning being that I’d love to do the New Years Day Zwift century ride. So I might save my legs tomorrow ahead of that one. Or maybe just do a short 15-20km easy ride tomorrow.
As it stands I have 6 days left on my Tacx Software 30 day premium trial membership. I’m almost certainly going to renew. I’m still trying to find the time to do a full review of this software. However, the short review is this:
If you enjoy climbing, and have done Zwift’s climbs one too many times, then try this. It’s really good.
I still have the weekly review to write, so I’m going to end this here.
