An interesting race today, but not in the way you might expect.
Everything about this one was fairly uninteresting, as far as racing on Zwift goes. The route was practically flat.
103m elevation over 20.8km.
Three laps, each of which sees the first half with almost no movement.
The second half is where the fun begins, if you can call it that. At approximately the half way point there is a little rise up to ~5%, and then just as quickly you are into a descending section.
Then there’s another short, curving uphill section, another ~4% or so.
After this, you ‘drop’ (and I do mean like, a wafting graceful descent) into the start of the Alley Sprint. Blink, or be in a bunch, and you might miss this one. It’s 2km from the lap end, and it lasts ~500m. That is important, as once you cross the Sprint banner line, there’s a power up to be had and it’s a 1.5km push to the start / finish line.
In short, all the action happens in the second half of each lap.
But really, there wasn’t much happening on any lap. The pace was high, constantly so. Several breakaways were attempted, and on lap 3 I thought it had stuck – it wasn’t until I saw the finish times that I realised they had been caught.
For me, the race was interesting for other reasons.
Cadence reasons.
And also power reasons.
I intentionally kept my cadence lower today. Well, as much as possible. Normally I’d fight to get my cadence back up, but my target for this one was ~85rpm instead of the usual 95rpm.
That seemed to translate into a higher overall power output. Which was needed, because the pace of this one was pretty much threshold or higher from the off. A great workout, in that regard.
My actual result wasn’t stellar. When is it?
Even so, the last lap was faster and harder (for me) than the first two, and though tired I managed to dig in an push right to the finish line.
It still utterly baffles me where I found more power from this earlier in the year because, believe me, I am trying so hard right now to set new highs. I know I won’t beat my year highs, but this one felt like a solid step in the right direction.
Weirdly Zwift is saying this was pretty much my 30 minute all time PB, but Golden Cheetah tells me otherwise.
