Mission accomplished then.
I wanted to do all of the Longer rides for the Tour de Zwift and it took to the very last day to get this last ride ticked off.
Last ride? Well, it was the first ride. But due to my regular over running Wednesday meeting, the first time around I missed my chance to do the longer route, but was determined to see it out in the make up week.
I’d imagine on Stage 1 at the time, we’d have had ~1000 or more riders for this one. But at 9am on a Sunday morning in the make up week we were down to ~300 or so. Still, not a bad turn out by any means. But it meant the front groups would almost certainly be smaller and harder to bridge.
And that was definitely the case.
I was only on the bike with 50 seconds to spare, but had had time for my breakfast (30g of Fruit & Fibre cereal, and a filter coffee) before this one was underway.
With an easy week in the legs, I was hoping to smash out about a 40kph average and see this one through in about an hour. Well, that was the ambitious plan.
Lap one went about as expected.
I’d made a bit of a slow started so spent the first five or six kilometres jumping bunches as I pushed forwards, probably at too fast a pace. Eventually I settled in around position 45-60 with a decent sized bunch.
Hoping to put out between 3.2-3.7w/kg, I was feeling decent for the first twenty minutes or so.
Still keeping with the bunch, I felt like I hit a brick wall at about 18km. The legs were protesting. But I was determined to hang on. Grit my teeth, see it through. Only one stage. And at the pace we were setting, it would be done and dusted before things got too bad.
Right?
Well, there wasn’t a great deal of climbing in this one. Just a little blip up the Acqueduc KOM which I had misjudged on lap one, using my feather too early. But no worries as I kept up fine.
Things were a little messier for me in the rollers at the end of the lap. The constant little zig zags… I don’t enjoy that sort of thing on the turbo, I find it really tricky to find a rhythm.
By the start of lap two there was no sign – at all – of the group ahead. I have no idea how far in front they were, but I never saw any indication of their location on the map, and didn’t notice anything on the time board either. They must have motored.
For the first half of the second lap I was doing fine.
But things went completely wrong from me at the second time up the Acqueduc KOM.
I popped my feather power up on the ascent, put in a short sharp stint up to about 400w or so, and then as I hit the plateau I took my foot off the gas, aiming to coast it a bit as the pack came back together.
Not so.
For whatever reason, I got dropped. Hard.
Now, I know there’s a bunch of physics at play in Zwift. I ride at ~67kg so expect to go faster up than some, but need to find the pack on the descents and ride that draft hard.
I kept up a decent pace, but it might as well have been me stopping pedalling. I put out my same wattage I’d been riding at and they just disappeared. There was no way I was catching.
So that sucked.
Anyway, as we all know, the Tour de Zwift is not a race. Except of course that it very much is, and I had to snap myself out of my mental dip as three riders behind caught me, then a fourth and a fifth shortly after.
Together we pushed to the end, each taking turns out the front. The gap ahead widened and continued to keep growing to the point where they must have finished if not two minutes ahead, then extremely close to that. Nuts. It begs the question whether I would have got dropped anyway, as my legs just were not for turning.
Even so, the best part of this ride for me was the finish.
We’d been a decent little bunch of five for ~10km or so, and we were tight at the last kilometre. One guy went, and collectively we kept with him, then another pushed, and as it got to about 400m out the sprinting truly began.
That was the tightest, most fun sprint finish I’ve had on the game that I can remember. I almost came fourth of the riders on screen, but at the line I just nicked it into third. However, the results from Zwift Power show four of us with the exact same time… so who knows.
Anyway, a cracking workout.
I really pushed myself on this one and came out with a decent average power for the time.
Happy with it all.
And very glad to have finished all the longer rides.
I’ll finish this today by saying if it hadn’t been raining – and it still is – I would almost certainly have skipped this and gone outdoors for a good 1.5 hour ride instead. Would that have come in at a similar amount of calorie burn? Doubtful.
So much for being rested anyway, I felt worse during this one with several easy days in me, than I did during the middle of the event with well worked legs.
Anyway, a thoroughly enjoyable series and now I’m very much looking ahead to the Tour of Watopia 2022.
