I hadn’t planned on doing Stage 6 of the Tour de Zwift 2021 today. Instead, I was planning a bit of a light / recovery ride.
However, today turned out to be the last day that Stage 6 was available, so it’s a jolly good thing I checked before choosing my ride, otherwise I would have had quite the red face.
Well, as it was I had quite the red face anyway, but for reasons of exertion.
Going into this one I expected it to be somewhat easier than the previous three stages. Less climbing, less distance, all things being equal, a similar pace? We should be home within the hour for tea and medals. Right? Right.
And by and large this was true.
A decent sized event at ~500 people meant there was always a pack around to settle in with, draft along as needed, and keep a steady ~40kph or so.
What I had forgotten was just how undulating Innsbruckring actually is.
Far more up and down than I remember. In my head I had it down as mostly flat, with a leg snapper and then a lovely glide downhill back to the sprint and a pootle home to cross the line.
Not so.
It’s at least 2km from the top of the leg snapper back to the line, and most of the lap is either going up or going down (+/- 2%).
I wasn’t aiming for much today. Keep a steady 3w/kg, I figured, and see it through. Especially as I had fairly tired legs going into it, and I had expected to be recoverising today (not a word, but you get the point).
Even so, I found myself gallivanting along at 3.5w/kg as always, and things were going swimmingly, until my eldest came in, sat down at the PC, and lo-and-behold, I lost connectivity to Zwift…
Arghhhh.
So I dropped ~40 places in this little disaster.
I watched the group I was with suddenly drop me. I couldn’t comprehend it. Then the group behind me tore past. And then another group.
I yelped at my kid, and coincidentally (and I do think it was coincidence), the thing kicked back into life. As per the graph, I tried smashing it but I wasn’t going to be able to make up that differential.
The “race” (it’s not a race) for me was over at that point. My motivation dipped, and whilst I did manage to recover, I never got back to where I was at. Sad times.
OK, but on the positive side:
- Completed 6/6 so far
- ~740 calories burned (mmm lollypop time)
- Managed to do this mid-afternoon due to work / life balance – good times
- Solid workout
Can’t complain really.
Stage 7 starts tomorrow. It’s something like 3, 4, and 5 laps of the Jungle Circuit, because the shorter, medium, and longer rides are all the exact same circuit, just a different number of laps.
Boo. Hiss.
Jungle is not fun-gle.
Probably do the medium one and get it out of the way, then take Thursday as a recovery day. Probably. Who the heck knows.
Argh! Hate the trainer drops! Microwave is banned from use in my house if I’m on the trainer!
I guess I’ve been pretty lucky to only have had it happen two times that I can recall. I had a complete connection drop once on the final 200m of a race – that really sucked, that recorded as a DNF as I crossed the line whilst offline.
Strange one really as I have a blue tooth dongle plugged into my PC, and I have a long extension wire that allows me to put an ANT+ usb dongle right under my trainer. So the interference or drop out had to be coincidence. Well, maybe. Hard to say. I think that’s why these things are so frustrating. There’s obviously some problem somewhere, but trying to track that down is practically impossible.