For tonight’s ride I took part in the Tour de Zwift: Stage 1 Race (C). And boy howdy was it knackering.
I have no delusions of grandeur. My goals for this race were simply:
- Show up
- Ideally burn 500+ calories
- Finish
Opting for Category C as I have done in previous Zwift races, I figured If I could finish in the top half then that would be a good result. Let’s see how I did.
As ever with a Zwift race, this one started hard. And it stayed hard. At just 16km (two laps of the London Classique + a bit of a lead in), there was nowhere to hide, and certainly nowhere to find prolonged recovery if I were to have any hope of finishing in the top half of the group.
For reference there was 248 riders in Category C. To finish in the top half I’d need to finish in 124th place or better.
I mean, that should be enough of a spoiler already, but anyway, let’s continue…
Out of the gate I went a bit silly. I’d done a ~25 minute warm up ride (also on the Classique – bit of recon) with a 10 minute effort in there to get the legs working and not have me jumping into this one unprepared.
I’m definitely glad I did the warm up. However my idea of reconnaissance kinda failed me. I’ll cover why towards the end of this ride report.
Within the first 5 minutes I was really starting to feel this one. At such a short distance the pace was frantic from the off, and in hindsight I shouldn’t have pushed quite so hard on the first small climb.
Now, this climb is what threw me later on. I don’t know the name of this section, but I got my road junctions confused later in the race.
My aim here was to climb hard, but then ease off a little once at the top. Any small climbs could work in my favour for sure, as the Classique is predominantly flat (like ~20m of climb a lap?) so I was definitely at a disadvantage in terms of available overall watts.
Unfortunately I perhaps climbed a little too aggressively and as I was having to recover at pace, I had immediate regret at my naivety.
During the first half of this race I managed to stick with a group who seemed to be pushing between 2.9w/kg and 3.1w/kg on average. It was hard to get a very accurate estimate as there were lots of riders around me, and I was at FTP, so concentrating on mathematics was not particularly easy to do.
Just keeping pace with these chaps was burning fuel at a pace that would be difficult to sustain, even with only 10km remaining.
At the start of the first lap proper I could feel myself falling behind the pack. Again, looking to riders around me, I was trying to gauge how hard they might be pushing, and what the consequences of me easing off might be. If only for a little bit.
Well, I tried a little light recovery, and was alarmingly quickly falling off the back of the bunch.
Desperately trying to cling on I decided to ditch the ideas of recovery, catch the pack back up as best I could, and then hopefully get a decent burst in the small climb back up to the big junction, and get back in the bunch that way.
Coming up to the climb I could already see that I was really going to struggle with this one. My legs were not filling me with confidence, and in truth I’d be looking at having to push extra hard just to catch the back of the pack, rather than get back into the bigger group.
I tried.
I really did.
I put in a stint on the little climb and managed to get myself back up, but then I had to almost sprint just to get back on to the closest wheel, and even though the sprint carried me into more of the bunch I’d thrashed myself too much.
Needing to ease off for recovery I very quickly fell off the back wheel and watched the steadily and surely disappear off in to the distance.
There were a couple of points for consolation:
- I wasn’t alone
- The group behind was ~15 seconds away
Fortunately for me, l. martinez was pulling way harder than I could sustain – somewhere around 3.1w/kg, whereas I was down aroudn 2.7w/kg at this point.
He carried me, and for that I am thankful.
I managed to use the 15 second gap to the next group as a fairly steady pace recovery interval lasting a good couple of minutes.
By the time the bunch behind caught us up, I can’t say I was refreshed but I was certainly in a better place than I had been at the point of falling off the pack a few minutes earlier.
It’s truly alarming how fast a pack of riders go compared with a single rider, or a pair.
Being that I was pretty much goosed by this point I was not for mucking around with camera angles or what not in order to gauge the speed of the approaching pack. When they did catch us, they very quickly swallowed both of us up and I was almost in danger of falling off the back of them as well, had I not got back on the gas and kept up pace.
If I had lost this second pack I would have been up the creek. No doubt about it.
Now, I’d managed to pick up a feather when starting the second lap, and I’d been holding on to it in the hope of using it not on the first climb (covered above), but on this imaginary second climb I had in my head.
Completely confused about the road layout, I falsely assumed we had two small climbs per lap and that my plan was to hold the feather through the initial climb and then power up the final hill and down onto the Mall to the finish line.
Alas, no.
As we turned the corner back up to the big junction I quickly realised that a 1% gradient was about as steep as it was going to get, and so decided I’d just use it in the final sprint and see what I got from it.
Being that the final 500 meters was pretty much the most intense burst of activity of my whole race, I sadly didn’t get any screen shots here.
I did manage to claw back several places though, so maybe the feather helped me more than I realised.
OK, so as above, there should have been no spoiler. 124th was not reached. I did not make the top 50%.
To be fair, I wouldn’t have even made the top 10 in Category D today – and from what I could see, for once Cat D looked pretty fair. No Category A racers accidentally in the wrong cat for a change! Amazing.
However the Category B racers seemed to thrash the Category A racers… so no idea what happened there. But whatever, congrats to all who took part.
That one was a tough ride.
I’m happy enough with how I performed, and I don’t think I could have done that much better. There were some tactical mistakes, and my overall pacing was mismanaged.
But I learned some lessons and got a solid workout in the process.
No complaints.
At this stage it is glaringly obvious I need to get back into Sweet Spot Training sessions.
I am in no way capable of holding 206w for an hour. I was pushing my limit here for 25 minutes, and unless I’m mistaken, this was the hardest 25 minutes I’ve done yet on the bike. Not the most consistent, but the hardest. The critical power graph below kinda shows this, but I’m confused by the read outs from it today.
I kinda expected more people to attend this one.
Maybe racing isn’t for everyone. Maybe the time wasn’t that suitable for many (17:12 GMT).
But even so, I really enjoyed it. Racing is the very best part of Zwift for me. It puts everything I do on the bike during workouts and group rides and climbs, and all the other stuff, into one intense experience.
Whilst I’d like to get back into the harder workouts at this point, the Tour de Zwift 2020 is not making that easy.
The London routes end on the 16th, and due to some real life commitments, I’m very unlikely to get on the bike tomorrow night.
Then on Thursday the Tour switches over to Innsbruck. I’m signed up to race again on Thursday night. That one is about 9km, two laps of the city portion of Innsbruck. Then there’s the climbing group ride on Sunday.
It may be that I re-arrange the race for Friday night instead. I’m feeling it after this one, but maybe I’ll be fine by Thursday.
As above, as best I understand the critical power graph, the orange line is this ride, and the grey line is my previous best.
If this orange line is above my grey line for 20 minutes, why did I not come out of this one with a higher FTP? I don’t really understand it.
Not that I rode as hard today as I did on my previous FTP Test, but I simply don’t understand that graph.
Anyway, it’s late. I’m knackered. It’s bath time.
