This morning I took part in Stage 4 of the Tour of Watopia 2020, riding the Longer Group Ride, aka 5 laps of the Jungle Circuit.
Fun, fun.
On this ride we were joined by Fabian Cancellara as ride leader. A nice touch.
It’s fairly common to start these ride reports as of late with excuses. So here we go:
- I raced yesterday, and struggled. There was no way my pacing today would be close to that.
- The Jungle Circuit inherently puts me on a bit of a downer, thus sapping my enthusiasm to perform.
- But worse: I have started with chest pain, and that’s worrying me.
Aiming to take this one fairly easy, I didn’t bother with a warm up. I instead caught my warm up on the lead in, and aimed to do around 3.1w/kg on the climbs, then coast the rest of the lap. Essentially five repeats of about 10 minutes on, 5-8 minutes off.
This had to have been one of the least ‘pack-y’ group rides I’ve ridden.
It seemed many were taking it as a race. And indeed I got lapped progressively starting some time around the 4th lap. Even Cancellara got dropped as best I could see, although he was doing an impromptu Q&A session, so I don’t think he was taking things too seriously.
From my slow start I’d slipped back down to about 1200th out of ~1500 riders.
Even though I wasn’t aiming to ride strongly, I was interested to see how many places I could pull back with five (hopefully) consistent climbs.
Sadly though, my climbing wasn’t consistent today.
The first and last lap were OK, the second lap was average, but the third and fourth laps were fairly poor.
For what it’s worth I didn’t feel too bad on the bike, chest pain or not. However, I did / am paying the price now that I’m off. Silly, silly me.
The Q&A session was interesting, though a bit manic. My question got missed 🙁
I guess we’ll never know what Mr. Cancellara is doing with his retirement.
On the last lap I went harder on the climb than I had on any of the previous three. Again, wasn’t looking to set any P.B’s or anything here, I just wanted to finish strong and get it over with.
Looking at my lap times you can get a sense of how “off the gas” I was on this one. It still felt as hard as yesterday, which is really confusing.
Anyway, glad to be done and dusted with the Jungle Circuit for the foreseeable future.
I honestly can’t say riding the MTB felt like it helped in any way whatsoever.
I still need to update my weight and reduce my auto-bumped FTP, so the graph below may look a tad misleading. But not by much.
At this point I think I’ll definitely opt for my typical Monday rest day, and then assess how I feel on Tuesday. Hoping to God that I feel a bit better than I do right now.
On a different note, I’m expecting that I’m going to be out of work by the end of this week, and if not this one, then almost certainly the end of the next. Sad times.
Hopefully not, but that too is preying on my mind.
Still, hoping to finish off the Tour of Watopia 2020 strongly. I believe Stage 5 is another trip to the Volcano, but I haven’t read much more than that at this point.
