These past few days I’ve been sure I’ve been going a touch mad. All that cycling, you say? Possibly. Or possibly I don’t quite get Zwift just yet.
I’ve mentioned a few times, over previous posts, that I’ve set off to do a circuit thinking the distance is some amount of kilometers, only to find I’ve not quite completed the full circuit when I reach that many kilometers. Today, I made absolutely double triple sure I was down for 4.1km:
Knowing that I could get round the circuit in 4.1km, I set out – mentally at least – to do three circuits.
I also made an approximate note of my starting position, hoping that I’d remember the scenery / landmarks as I came back around my loop. But that’s not how this works. Note there is a lead in to the circuit:
It’s a little easier to see this today on Strava, as the map overlay has completely broken:
In short, and what I didn’t really think about, is that yes, a circuit is a set length, but you don’t necessarily start at the start / finish line. So be aware that some additional ‘run up’ is involved. Sounds fairly obvious in hindsight. Warm up space, and all that. I am not a smart man.
It was really quiet on Watopia this morning. Seemingly not a lot of interest in cycling on a wet Monday morning.
At the time of riding, there were 324 people cycling round Watopia, versus 861 Zwifting around Richmond. I’m not a big fan of Richmond, even though it has some of the shortest circuits of the maps I’ve been on. Instead, I opted for Volcano Circuit on Watopia.
Even with ~300 people online, there are always virtual cyclists pedalling past me, often much faster than I. If I understand this correctly, there were 9 other riders doing the Volcano circuit at the same time I was, and so we were each competing against each other on the Live Results tab.
In between me finishing my laps, and getting to take the screenshot, one of the riders scores dropped off. I assume this means they disconnected.
There’s loads of cool things about these leaderboards. Here’s the alternative graphic that Zwift switches between every ~10 seconds or so:
You can see that I managed two full circuits. The second circuit I was 2 seconds off my original pace. Still a long way to go to be in the 7 minutes zone, let alone up there in the top 4 with a six minute time.
Having that competitive element is really helpful for me. As I was riding up to the marked start / finish point (more on that in a second), Zwift popped up a little overlay telling me who the next time to beat was, and this helped spur me on to improve my own performance.
At this point I feel I am very gradually improving. I’ve only been riding now for 11 days so don’t expect miracles.
According to the stats my overall averages were close to my best performance, so that’s good, I guess.
And finally today I’ve managed to ride over 100km in total.
