Right then, off we go with the Tour de Zwift for 2022.
Straight up, I wanted to do the longer ride. That’s the ~50km / two laps of France Route Grand Vitesse (RGV) ride. However, I thought we had way longer per Stage than we do.
It turns out Stage 1 ends today, pretty much. I think the last ride is 10am tomorrow, so for me, effectively today. Stage 2 starts tomorrow and runs till Sunday. That, at least, gives me chance to do the Alpe du Zwift ride over the weekend (Sunday morning).
Anyway, enough about Stage 2, let’s cover Stage 1.
Unfortunately I had issues with timings on this ride. My only option today was to join the 12 noon GMT ride. However, my 11am work meeting overran, so I had to join the ride but not actually dress or set off until about 10 minutes after the bunch had bolted.
Essentially then, this one was a TT ride for me.
Now, I have no issues with this. In some ways that was a good thing. Having all those people ahead of me (pretty much 99% of the ride participants) was pretty good in a way. Just catching up with the very first person meant me putting in an effort. And when I reached them I decided to keep going… and going.
Because this was only 30km, by the time I’d caught up the back end of the ride I’d already chomped through about 50% of the distance, so decided to just keep on slogging.
Throughout this ride my aim became to keep above 3w/kg.
Now, this wasn’t all about setting some new PBs. Actually, that wasn’t on my mind at all. I simply needed to get a shower and some food before my dinner hour was up 😀 The faster I could get the ride done, the more time I’d have to wash and eat.
Turns out I ended up absolutely smashing myself during this one.
Looking at the stats below, this was my best 20 (and 30) minute efforts on a Zwift ride.
However, looking at some reports from Garmin, these aren’t my all time highest efforts in those time frames.
Even so, I feel like I worked damned hard today. Probably going to be paying for this later.
My plan now is to do a recovery ride tomorrow, take it fairly easy on Saturday, and then push hard on Stage 2 / Alpe du Zwift on Sunday morning.
Fun times.
The one disappointing thing today was not getting to do the Longer ride. And I’m not sure if I will even get to do this during the make up days. It really depends how they fall. Time specific rides are a pain for me.
Anyway, I didn’t miss the stage. That’s probably the main thing.
