Tour de Zwift 2023 | Stage 2 | Longer Ride

Onwards to Stage 2, where this year’s Longer Ride would be tackling Richmond in reverse, not once, not twice, but thrice.

Yes, whoever has decided on courses and routes this year is something of a sadist.

Going into this one I knew one thing, and one thing only: that a lap of Richmond, forwards or reverse, takes me (on average) 25 minutes.

With three laps, and a little bit of rudimentary maths, that should mean an estimated time of around 1 hour and 15 minutes.

As ever with the Tour de Zwift (and similar) rides, this one was very well attended. Combine the large and popular event with a Saturday lunch time start time and on the longer ride today we had over 1,000 Zwifters doing their thing.

Going out the gates today I wasn’t planning on going overly hard. I’d done my hard riding earlier on in the week.

But that wasn’t the only reason for pacing myself today.

The main thing on my mind was that, typically lately, I have only been doing 45 minute sessions. Races are even shorter than that.

So I know that around the one hour mark, I’m cooked. And as above, I knew this one would take longer than an hour.

With that in mind then, the target for this ride was ~3.0w/kg on average. And by and large, I stuck to that.

But the best laid plans, etc, they often go out of the window when it comes to Zwift group rides.

One such way things went a little sqwiffy today was on the climbs.

Now, being Richmond that means 3 climbs.

In reverse these come in the format of:

23rd Street KOM Reverse (1.1km @ 3.5% for 39m)
KOM Reverse (0.68km @ 3.6% for 26m)
Main Street Climb (1.35km @ 3.5% for 47m)

Those all come together in the first half of the map.

Then after that it’s about 9km of fairly flat stuff, before the lap begins again. Repeat 3x and you’re done.

The whole idea of doing 3.0w/kg went out of the window on the climbs.

In order to stay with the group, it took me a little while to realise they were kicking up to ~4.0w/kg (or higher).

For once I didn’t bother to try to stay with them.

Some of them bolted, never to be seen again. Others lagged behind on the climbs but hurtled passed me on the descents.

But there were always people around to hang with, and chat too.

Actually it was the social aspect that really stood out today.

Without killing myself, I was far more able to have a chat and a laugh along the way. That helped take my mind off the inevitable tiredness that set in somewhere around the 20km marker.

I do remember looking up, seeing 22km done and still having about 24km left to go and I thought… oh… bugger.

But anyway, we got through it.

When it came to the last lap we actually lapped a pace bot. Crazy.

Speaking of the last lap, it was at the top of the third and final climb of the day that I managed to get a feather power up. Boy, they were few and far between during the rest of the ride.

Mean.

Then as ever it came to the end and a bunch of guys went for the sprint finish.

Not me. Not today. I’ll save that for next Tuesday.