Monday isn’t usually a riding day for me, or hasn’t been for a while. But a combination of factors got me excited to ride today.
One of them was that I skipped Saturday. As it was, I got into my kit, got the PC booted up, and loaded up MyWhoosh on Saturday afternoon, but nothing on there could tempt me to click ‘start’, as my legs were feeling tired, I had a bit of a headache, and generally I really wasn’t in the mood. At that point I thought, why? Why am I bothering to do this, just because it’s a Saturday? So I skipped it.
Then yesterday I’d usually do a longer walk on Sunday morning, but instead I went out to a different spot for a walk with my dad, and we had to get back for 10:30 so only managed about 5km. I forgot to record that on Strava until about half way around, so in reality it was only half of half a walk.
Cut to today and I’m thinking I might not ride on Thursday this week. It’s my birthday and I’m thinking I might go for a nice (probably very wet) walk somewhere further afield. Maybe Pendle Hill or out that way. Maybe not the hill, but the village of Pendle, I don’t know yet.
So that means riding Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Or Friday. But I’d rather do three in a row.
I fired up MyWhoosh mid-morning to see what was on offer and saw a 30 minute live session would be happening at 12:30, and I thought that sounded ideal. Not just because it was only 30 minutes, but because I’ve previously done some of the VoD recorded sessions and was really keen to check out one in-person.
By lunch time I was ready to go, looking forwards to trying out something new.
I was on about 12:15, so did a short stint with the pace bots to get warmed up. The event countdown was on in the bottom corner, and one of the nice things about it was that it did an auto countdown / join thing with 3 minutes to go. That was actually a really good thing, because this part did not work. I realised I had a problem, exited my ride, and when I did so only then did it transfer me to the Belgium world to the start line.
There were 17 of us in the bunch, which is easily the biggest number of real people I have seen in one place on MyWhoosh. That in itself is a really good thing.
As soon as I got in I said hello in the chat, and ride leader Emma Martin was interacting with the bunch, saying hello and letting us know what was in store. Honestly, if this was behind a paid subscription, I would have been thinking this was fantastic. For free? Pretty nuts. Not sure how long that will continue, but this was something I would have paid for.
This being my first group ride on MyWhoosh I had some questions, all of which were answered by Emma as I posted them in the chat.
One was around whether rubber banding was enabled. Yes, is the answer. For those unaware, rubber banding is a software technique that pulls the group back together. If the person on the left of you is putting out 5w/kg, and the person on the right is putting out 1.5w/kg, you all stay together.
Another interesting thing today was Si Bradeley – one of the other VoD ride leaders – was in the bunch. I assume they are paid staff members of MyWhoosh, though I’m really not sure what the setup is. Regardless, it was nice to say hello and thank you for the sessions of his that I have done so far.
Being only 30 minutes, this session was over really quickly. There were two sets to be completed, each at about 10 minutes of work, so a fairly low intensity start to the week. It was a good one to try out and see if I liked the format, and I would say yes, I loved it. I am definitely keen to do more of these. Fortunately they do seem to sit around my lunch break times.
Overall, I cannot rate this highly enough, nor recommend it to you enough.
If you’re looking for something new, give this a shot. And if you’re not, give it a shot anyway. What is to lose?
