Taking on Zwift’s Box Hill Climb

This morning I unknowingly attempted the Box Hill climb on Zwift’s London map. One of the joys of a new game is exploring the maps. After a while, you will have played them all, found favourites, and added a few to your list to avoid.

With no real idea of how hard it is to climb hills on Zwift, I figured taking on a hillier route than my usual Flat circuits would be an interesting Saturday morning proposition.

Last night I decided I’d have a longer-than-usual ride this morning. By way of prep for this, I shifted my amp and speakers downstairs. This way, I could ride without headphones, which generally irk me as they rub against my skin when riding hard.

My setup is still far from perfect. Every day, it seems, I forget something. As usual, today I forgot to turn on the fan before starting the ride. I’m thinking maybe just leave the fan on setting 2, angled at my upper body / face, and then buy an Alexa / Smart Plug to “OK Google, can we start the fans, please!”

Thing is, that’s like £25 of expense when I could… just… remember to turn the thing on to begin with. How lazy am I? Anyway, the kids are in and out so frequently I can usually hang on a few mins for one of them to come to my rescue.

All my hard work with shifting the amp and speakers, then wiring it all up, was for naught. As my phone battery died about 8 minutes into the ride. Serves me right. I knew it was low last night, then completely forgot about that before getting on to the saddle. Oh well.

I’ve thought, maybe it would be a good idea to have a pre-ride checklist. A bit like a pilot. There’s so much stuff to remember:

• Towel
• Fan
• Music
• Phone
• Plug everything in

It’s a bit much for my brain to contemplate first thing in the morning. And then once I’ve started riding I refuse to stop pedaling until I’m done.

Using the Zwift Companion App

One thing I’ve been wanting to do for the last few weeks is to get the Zwift companion app up and running whilst on my ride. Last night, I downloaded and installed it on my phone. Perfect. I even remembered my Zwift username and password first time to log in. Result.

It all works by wifi, as best I can tell. No need to hook it up in-game. It just works. Turn on the app, start a ride, and it becomes a map, and such. I would have taken some screenshots of the ride, but as mentioned, the battery went before I could. I’ll get some tomorrow, I hope.

Unfortunately, the experience wasn’t perfect. Major gripe: the app only works in Portrait Mode. My GripTight GorillaPod phone holder holds the phone in Landscape Mode. Epic. Fail.

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The other thing is, for the second ride in a row now, my towel has fallen off / been blown off my handlebars, dropping to the floor. I have to then wait for a passer by to help pick it up, which also means momentarily stopping pedaling. This is because I can no longer fit my towel fully over the steering rack due to the GorillaPod on the bars. Not ideal.

One cool thing about the Zwift Companion App that I didn’t know I could do is the setting of goals. I added one. A weekly distance of 75km total. Should smash that.

The interface on the app is really helpful in locating interesting sounding group rides, and you can filter them by your capability. I’m going to keep an eye on this and see if anything fun crops up.

Lastly, to completely negate the need for me to plug in a wire from my amp to my phone, I have ordered a RCA to stereo jack.

This means (I hope) I can plug in the little Bluetooth receiver I have, and then pipe music from phone to amp, wirelessly. We shall see. Worth a punt at £1.92 delivered.

In A Box After That Climb

Today I rode the London Loop, a 15.1km circuit with 230.3m of climbing.

I’m not sure if this counts as a climbing circuit or not. To me it does. I think one of the New York circuit’s I’ve done previously has had some climbing in. But nothing had seemed as intense as this, so far.

This circuit is actually a lot of fun to ride. There’s all kinds of sights to see, and some fun “gamey” bits along the way. One of the most fun parts was the initial stretch of the ride, where at one point, we veered off the road, and went down into the London Underground, riding on boarded over track. Very cool.

Of course, in order to get onto the underground, you have to go down. And quite sharply. Down the slope that would normally have the escalators. Fun.

At this stage I was grouped up with a small pack. I find riding in a pack like this to be quite distracting. But in a good way. It makes me work that much harder, and stops me clock watching so much. Where normally I might only push for a minute, or two, I find I can go three minutes, maybe three and a half. I really like this.

And then BAM.

The climb started. I had no idea what I was in for. Suddenly it was all uphill, and never less than 5% gradient. It snaked back on itself, mercilessly. Every time I rounded a bend, I was thinking “for the love of God, when does this bit end?”

Turns out, it went on for quite some time.

Easily the hardest I’ve had to dig in. I was determined not to stop pedaling until I reached the top. That said, I think I did have to momentarily stop when my towel fell off, and my little girl had to reach between the pedals and the wheel to pull it out for me. Phew.

Little did I know that this was a “named” hill. The Box Hill. Only when I got about 3/4’s of the way around did a little prompt pop up telling me about my current time on the climb the leaderboard, and all that jazz. A bit like the Sprints do. Very cool. Another great motivator to push me up… and up.

At last, when I’d reached the top, the little count down thing started, pushing my to ride harder to the finish. And when I crossed the line, Zwift automatically changed the camera angle to a celebration type shot. That was a really nice touch.

After this there’s a very long, much needed rest as the long descent begins. This was awesome. I managed to get up to 74kph, I believe it was. My legs were tired, but I still kept up the revolutions as best I could.

Finally, when the descent had ended, we had to go back up. Up the subway escalators, that is. That was fun too, though a brutal 14% gradient. Only for a few hard meters, thankfully.

Overall I really enjoyed this ride. I’ll know next time just how hard a climb might be if it’s a similar number of meters on a different route / distance combo.

I really feel like I worked hard today. And Zwift obviously does too.

I managed to get the Zwift Ride man to say something other than “OK!”.

FTP Bump – 140w to 142w

A final victory point for today is that Zwift has bumped my FTP up from 140w to 142w. I’m not honestly sure I could sustain ~140w for a full hour. Which is, what I believe, the FTP figure represents.

After weighing myself today I’m down to 11st 5lb, which seems to translate to 72.3kg, which means I need to update my weight on Zwift.

I’m not trying to lose weight. I have stopped drinking a beer every night after work. Instead, I have two beers at the weekend, and that’s more than enough. A glass or two of wine at the weekend is always nice, too. I attribute the weight loss to that more than anything.

All in all, a bloody good, if knackering ride. I have no plans for tomorrow ride, so will maybe do a workout instead. And I’ll remember to charge my phone tonight.