If the comments were to be believed today, we ought to have been riding Makuri 40 for this one, but due to bugs in the recent Zwift release, we were instead re-routed to Chasing The Sun. Personally I would rather have done Chasing The Sun, as it’s shorter, and I am lazy.
Today was really all about doing a proper effort. At ~60 minutes estimated, I knew I could pretty much go for it. That’s about my ideal length of ride. Beyond that, I fall off a cliff, and shorter than that and I’m a lot less sure how to pace it.
Feeling like I was back to full strength today, my plan was to aim for ~230w, find a group to help me when I lulled, and give myself a solid ‘race pace’ road testing.
The fact that I knew this one was ~60 minutes tells you I must have done some recon. Well, I skim read my previous blog post and saw my time was 57 minutes and change, and figured I’d aim around there.
Annoyingly I did see that this ride features two climbs. But whilst on route today, between the first climb in Neoyko and the Temple KOM, I err, kinda forgot I was doing two. Which meant, just like last time, I over pushed during the ‘flat’ bit and so was caught a little off guard when I remembered that yes, this one has two climbs… oops.
Anyway, I was thankfully not at the bottom of the Temple KOM climb when I realised this. So I had ~2km or so to compose myself (and ease off a bit).
Somehow it seemed to work in my favour. I PR’d the Temple KOM through sheer force of will. It was one of those efforts where I figured the harder I pushed, the sooner it would be over. I didn’t really have a target wattage, just keep trying to hit 95RPM and had made a mental note of exactly how many kilometres would be on the ride clock when I hit the finish line.
About the only downer today was ~2.5km out I felt my left knee twinge. Kinda concerning. Hopefully it’s fine. I guess it is. Fortunately 2.5km on the flat stuff is a lot faster than 2.5km out was on La Reine.
Tomorrow is going to be an easier day though. That’s a given. I’m going to try and see if I can get the Garmin to set the workout, and then do the ride in MyWhoosh. No idea if that will work, but that is the plan nonetheless. If it all goes wrong then I’ll switch to my backup plan of doing a Zone 2 ride on Zwift.
It feels strange to think that we’ve done 7 stages of the Tour de Zwift 2023 already. Today’s the end of January. It’s not been a great month off the bike – still very actively job hunting – but on the bike, aside from that knee injury it’s been pretty good. Can’t wait to get back to racing, but I think before then I’m going to kill off the Scotland map and see out Stage 8, leaving a race for the weekend.
But as ever, plans change so who knows.
