I wanted to tackle a climb of about 500 metres or so. I thought that MyWhoosh had at least one route that would tick this box, but I couldn’t find it. What I ended up doing was picking a route that had about 600 metres of climbing, spread over 36km. While it turned out to be taxing—probably the hardest ride I’ve done in recent months, in terms of calories if nothing else—it wasn’t a perfect tick in the box.
What I can definitely say about this ride is that it completely took it out of me, to the point where afterwards I felt like I wanted to go to sleep. I hadn’t had a particularly good night’s sleep on Friday into Saturday, but after this one, I was just completely bushed. It’s been ages since I’ve felt like that after a bike ride. It’s more the sort of feeling I would get after riding Alpe du Zwift or similarly difficult climbs.
I think perhaps one of the most disappointing things, really, from certain points of view, is that the reason I picked this ride was because I knew it included the Blaze Climb. It’s the most visually interesting climb I’ve seen on MyWhoosh so far. It’s got a really cool sort of fiery phoenix or something at the top of it. But the problem was, I was so exhausted by the time I reached the base of the climb that I had my head down for pretty much all of it, so I missed all the cool visuals.
The other thing that I found really challenging on this ride was that I rode it with 100% trainer realism. It was really difficult to find any sort of rhythm on practically all of the climbs, no matter how small or long. Several parts of each climb suddenly ramped up—some of the gradients today were around 12%. On the longer, dare I say more gradual climbs, it was more like 7–9% at times.
However, it was the constant ebb and flow—where the gradient might drop to about 2% for a little bit or even a short flat—that really made it hard to get into a rhythm or build momentum. It’s pretty rare for me to be out of the saddle, but there were times, particularly later on in the ride, where I just had to stand up to stretch my legs for fear of cramping up.
So I think further investigation is required to try and find climbs that are fairly uninterrupted at around 500 metres on MyWhoosh. I know there are several on Zwift that fall into this category, and the ones I can think of are the Epic KOM—whether forward or reverse—and also the German one, whose name escapes me.
I’m wondering if there are any similar climbs on the Colombia map, which wasn’t actually available yesterday at the time of riding. I know Colombia has quite a lot of climbing on there. I also know that MyWhoosh has plenty of longer, harder climbs, like those with over 1,000 metres of elevation gain. I don’t think I’m up to that just yet, as I’m really struggling to complete the shorter ones.
One other thing to finish off with today is that I’m looking for some new bib shorts in the Black Friday sales. On some of my rides, I’m able to do things like browse the internet while riding, but that wasn’t the case today—it was too challenging a ride.
I’m hoping to get myself one or maybe two new pairs of bib shorts, as I only really have two decent pairs left now. So, it’s definitely time to treat myself. Anyway, that’s enough from me for this week.
