In my mind, bagels are delicious breakfast muffin type thing, packed full of stuff that’s largely bad for you: Philadelphia cheese, a bit of ham, maybe a few salad leaves, and whatever else looks interesting on the breakfast buffet.
Or, in other words, I have never bought my own bagels when at home, but if I see them when I’m on holiday, I make a very enjoyable sandwich out of them.
Zwift has some other ideas as to what a Bagel entails. Mainly hard work, by which I mean climbing.
In short, for this morning’s ride I chose Zwift’s New York Everything Bagel route, which is ~35km and ~550m of climb. I did some comparisons prior to riding, and was happy enough to figure this would be about the same as riding the Epic KOM + Radio Tower, but with all the climbing spread out of the full “lap”.
What I somewhat dislike about Zwift is that often you are thrown into a climb, or a sprint, before you’ve had time to warm up. My opinion is that nothing too exertive should happen within 5km of starting a route.
Now, granted, this would make for some long and boring intros, but I think it doesn’t do anyone any good to have to dive right into it without a proper warm up.
Imagine then, my delight at hitting the Reverse KOM within 2.5km of starting the ride.
Gearing was probably the biggest challenge on this ride.
I’ve done both of New York’s KOM’s before so was already aware they are both short, but sharp.
I quite like this, however. It may be a lot of work, but they are over quickly.
As best I recall, I was in the little ring (at the front) for all of my climb attempts today. My main aim was to stay at or above 85rpm if at all possible. Less focus was placed on watts. Maybe this is a bad idea.
On the first attempt at the Reverse KOM I had somewhat messed up… kind of.
I use Zwift for the entire workout. There’s no gain for me in taking things easy just for saving myself to hit the timed segments. I don’t really care about my times (though you wouldn’t guess it from this blog) as much as I care about doing something in terms of exercise.
With that in mind, I’d been at or around 85rpm since the very start of the “Sky Loop”, meaning I’d been burning my energy reserves way before hitting the KOM start line. This definitely impacted my time.
Hitting the descent I found myself on part of the map I’m not sure I’ve ever seen before. That purple bit? New to me, I’m sure.
Hah. All that said about me not caring about times? Well, throw it out of the window. I can’t help myself when I see a timed segment.
(But what I mean is I really don’t beat myself up for not coming first ;))
Knowing the map meant I was good and ready for this sprint, and whilst I went to try and get under 11 seconds today, I was just shy of the mark. Not too shabby on this one, by my standards.
Having started the day at about 88km of riding done for the week, I knew I’d hit my 100km riding goal fairly early in today’s ride. Always good to get that tick in the box.
Having not ridden the Everything Bagel route before, I wasn’t too sure how quickly the second KOM attempt would be upon me.
As it turns out, they are spaced quite far apart. Certainly enough time to have recovered to at least 80%.
I was tricked somewhat by heading up the Sky Loop a second time. There’s the initial climb to get back on to the loop, but then quite a long ride round the loop to get to the start of the Forward KOM.
During this time I found that I had a new appreciation for the New York map.
I have to say, New York was easily my least favourite Zwift map when I first started out. I’m not sure if this was because of some bad experiences on there, or just because I find the scenery a little… dull?
Well, anyway, when up on “top of the world”, I like the map a lot more. Having never been to New York in real life, I have no real understanding of how accurate this map is. I know there’s no Sky Loop in real life, or flying horse and carts etc, but I mean, I have no connection to it. Unlike, say the Yorkshire map.
But today, for whatever reason, I found myself really enjoying the route. And if anything, the entire ride went by really quickly.
Given the long ride around the Sky Loop, I gave myself a bit of time to recover ahead of the hard work ahead. I was expecting the climb to take me between 5 and 6 minutes. Again, the idea would be to be at, or as close to 85rpm or greater throughout.
I have to say I struggle with the climbs when flat sections are involved. Especially short flat sections.
With Zwift’s trainer lag, it can be quite tricky to time when to shift gears. As such on the flat sections I find it difficult to keep up a decent momentum. I often find myself spinning over 100rpm with virtually no wattage output, yet by the time I’ve down-shifted, it’s back on the climb again, so feels really janky.
I guess it’s a skill I’ve yet to master.
I really need to sort out (read: fix and automate) my Leaderboards as I have no idea how strong my performances are without searching back through the blog.
Yes, another whinge and moan about Zwift’s 30 day PRs.
My lack of map / route experience showed on the second sprint attempt. Coming down from the Forward KOM, the sprint was almost immediately upon me. And I was not ready, at all.
Again, I can’t remember the last time I attempted this sprint, so have no idea how I performed comparatively. At a guess, not spiffingly.
The issue here being that it was only as I rounded the corner, and saw the sprint marker, that I down shifted and started to crank the pedals. Definite room for improvement here. But in truth, today I was here for the climbs not the sprints.
I wasn’t entirely sure how long it would take me to complete ~35km and ~550m of climbing, but found 1h 10m a seemingly decent time by my standards.
I’ve not felt particularly fresh on the bike for a few weeks now. I know I can do better than some of these performances. But the exercise is definitely worthwhile, regardless of whether I’m setting new PB’s or not.
On this front, as daft as it sounds, today I realised I could definitely be pushing down harder on the pedals.
This gives me hope that I have a bunch more “easy” gains to be made in terms of power / performance.
I’m going to need to really work on building up my leg muscles, but now I’m aware of it, I can start building this into my workouts. It sounds really basic / daft in hindsight, but there we go.
Given that I’d completed the route, I was ready to call it a day. But at “just” 35km for the ride, I felt like I could do a little more.
I decided to have another go at the reverse KOM.
This time, however, I took it easy until the start line. Yes, I know, totally hypocritical against everything I’ve blogged about today. In order to justify this, this wasn’t to try to set a new PB. It was simply me being a bit lazy.
Even though it was my second attempt, that leg saving strategy really paid off.
Slashing 4 seconds off the previous time. I was happy with this, but had I used the same strategy as I had on the first lap, I would have been significantly slower, I imagine.
With that second climb done, I used the descent and a little bit more as my cool down period, before jumping off the bike.
In hindsight, I wish I’d stayed on and done the full second lap. I had the time, but was being pestered by the kids to come and watch their dance show. Real life must prevail.
40km, 687m of climbing, 818 calories. All good.
What I am a bit disappointed about is what I mentioned yesterday:
Whilst I’m not overly concerned about my weight, I have gained a bunch over the last 2 weeks. I’ve risen from 11 stone 1, to 11 stone 5 as of this morning. Sad times. In short, I’ve been over eating on my dinner times. I put this down to being a little unhappy at work, and also over stuffing my lunch box as I’ve been feeling so hungry in the mornings prior to eating.
At least I’m aware of it, and am resolved to cutting down particularly on the amount of cheese I’m going to put in my packed lunch.
Oh, and that means I need to bump my weight back up on Zwift to 72kg. Sad times.
It felt great to get a climbing ride in on Zwift for a change.
I took a cheeky peak at the stats for this week compared to last via Training Peaks, and even though overall distance and time were slightly down on last week, the amount of exercise in terms of calories burned etc are very similar.
It’s all about loving the climb.
As mentioned, cadence was a challenge on this ride, as it so often is on a real ride. Those pesky rollers.
Heart rate below 190bpm though, every cloud.
At only one point did I come close to matching a previous personal best on this ride.
I can feel this. I’m not feeling as energetic or strong as of late. I’m wondering if this is because I have stopped drinking the Whey Powder shakes after each ride, or whether I’m simply tired.
Are two days a week off the bike enough, in terms of recovery?
Does it matter I’m not setting new highs? I really have no idea. It’s stuff I need to think on, and will cover more in this week’s review.
Now, time for a bagel sandwich.
