This morning I hit the climb I’ve been a mixture of looking forward too, and fearing all week. Would it break me? Would I be able to finish it? And if so, would my time be any good?
Well, things didn’t start too well today. I’ve long since given up on the 9am start time during this L’Etape du Tour series, and have instead opted for the 11am slot. Sunday is the only day of the week I get a chance at a lie in, so I’d rather not throw that away to slay myself on the turbo. Unless I absolutely have too, of course.
I’d woken at ~9.30, planning a breakfast of fruit and fibre and some additional nuts. That went down well enough, helped along by a cup of coffee.
Switching to Zwift means shutting down my computer from Linux, my day to day nerd OS of choice. That also means shutting down / closing off all my work stuff, which is, to be honest, a massive pain in the ass.
Just as I was about to shut down, I got an email to say one of my servers had died. Bad times. This led to a rather frantic dash of rebooting the server, then logging in and restarting all the sites – fortunately not that difficult, but quite time consuming. I didn’t want to be going into this one with a bunch of sites being offline (including this one) on the back of my mind.
I got everything up and running, but it was about 10:57 when I did so. Rebooting, I just about managed to get in game to find the event had started but they were still on the flat. Thank God.
So much for a warm up though.
I joined in as best I could and tried to pace myself early on, but we were on the climb well earlier than I anticipated. We’d hit the start of the climb at around 2km, and there was very little respite from that point on.
Having no plan, I settled in around 200-220w, and honestly, found that first section really quite challenging.
Climbing out of the town and up to the turn off to the Mont Ventoux proper, there was a constant requirement to change gears, and frankly I struggled here. My legs didn’t feel up to it, and mentally I wasn’t really wanting to do ~1.5hours worth of effort.
Going into each of these L’Etape du Tour events, I haven’t done any pre-ride recon, so have been riding pretty much blind.
There’s pros and cons to this.
Seeing everything for the first time is fun. But not knowing what’s coming up makes things much harder.
Unlike the Alpe du Zwift, there’s no enhanced UI here. Just a plain old Zwift experience.
And frankly the top right mini map is utter garbage for a climb like this. It’s impossible to see ahead in any capacity, and I completely misunderstood what the mini map meant until I was about 1/3rd of the way up the climb.
Basically the top right mini map doesn’t change. That gradient is a 20km birds eye view. It’s frankly useless to the ride.
And speaking of Alpe du Zwift, that ride is sooo much more varied than this one.
OK, so Zwift cannot control what happens on a real world route. I get that. But they could add way more fun elements to this route. Compared to last week, this one was boring.
In many ways it reminded me of the gray and equally dull RGT Cycling’s Passo dello Stelvio. Especially at the top.
Come on Zwift devs, this is a computer game. Add some visual fun here, please!
Huge swathes of this grinding climb were devoid of features. Such a lost opportunity.
Things to note here were that between ~5 to ~15km were probably the hardest parts of this route.
The gradient seemed steepest in this section, averaging around 10% I’d say, with one thankfully very brief trip up to 15% thrown in for fun.
There are kilometre markers dotted along this route. Most are hard to see, as they are in shadow. They also look very remarkably like tombstones. Which my legs felt was rather apt.
I was wondering how quickly I was making each kilometre. Zwift offers no help here. Fortunately the Garmin Edge 530’s lap feature told me I was between 5 and 7 minutes, depending on the steepness of each “lap”.
Given this info I realised I’d be around the 1.5 hour mark to hit the top of the climb. I seemed to be just about on target for the time I had set in my head. This, however, was based solely on a complete guess. This guess being based on people in previous rides telling me Mont Ventoux was 1.5x the distance of Alpe du Zwift, and 500m more climb, give or take.
After about 15km, things did seem to ease a tad.
There were a handful of sections where things almost levelled out. You know it’s tough going when 7% feels flat.
But after 15km the average gradient seemed more around 7 to 8%, rather than the unrelenting 10% of the previous 10km.
What was hardest about this climb, for me, was in not even being at the “10km remaining” marker by the time I was feeling completely thrashed.
So many times I was out of gears.
I often try and save my easiest gear for the 10% sections, but today it felt like I was almost consistently at that point and had nowhere left to go. Cadence, too, was a real mission today. I just didn’t seem to have the legs to push beyond the mid 80’s at best.
One visually nice touch was in the final kilometre or so. The finish line (I thought it was a lighthouse, but it isn’t) briefly comes in sight, hidden behind some fog / clouds. Then it disappears again. I have no idea if this happens every time, or was a fluke of the “weather” (which Zwift definitely doesn’t model, so I’m guessing that’s a static animation that repeats every climb).
I managed to kick it up a notch with just the final kilometre left to go. Probably means I left way too much in the tank, but whatever. I did my best, given what I knew.
And yes, it does end on a nice steep bit. Lovely.
With a climb time of 91.56, or 01:31:56, I’m happy enough with my effort.
I clearly now have a target to beat – get under 1h 30m 🙂
Should be achievable. But not any time soon. I have no desire to repeat that whilst there is nice weather to enjoy outside.
And I think that miffed me most today. I’m there inside on the turbo, sweating my backside off, when for the first day in what seems like at least a week, it was shaping up to be a lovely (albeit British) summers day outside.
Anyway, after this one I’d promised myself a treat.
Thankfully this week I managed to secure a new contract job position.
So with the hard climb done, and with the new job contract signed and ready to start in a few weeks, I went on over to one of the ride sponsors – Rapha – and grabbed myself a jersey and a jacket.
And some sun glasses and another jersey, from Amazon and Sigma Sports respectively.
Honestly, I’m very much a “carrot” kinda guy. And this climb felt very much like a “stick”.
Coming off this one I felt decent enough. Better than expected. Happy to have completed it.
Cracking 1350 calories is insane.
That’s last nights fish and chips smashed, for sure.
Also, the descent on this route is crazy. It goes on for ages. But in many ways it’s great to get that post climb spin back into the legs. Hoping that helps the recovery tomorrow.
At this point I don’t actually know if this was the final ride in the L’Etape du Tour series.
I hear there is the Champs-Élysées route to do, but as far as I know, they don’t actually race this in the real Tour de France, do they? It’s more of a celebratory thing.
Will Zwift do this? I have no idea. Something to investigate.
Of everything today, setting a 2 hour power record was probably the big thing for me. I’ve consistently struggled over an hour, so to do a solid 2 hour stint was likely really good for me and my riding.
I’m very much looking forward now to a rest day – tomorrow – and then once my new cycling clobber comes, and I get a nice sunny day, I’m going out to do a proper long outdoor session. That will, hopefully, be Wednesday. But we shall see.
Until then, what doesn’t Mont Killyoux only makes you stronger, right?
