This afternoon’s ride was the Tour for All 2020: Stage 4 Shorter Ride, which amusingly turned out to take longer than the Stage 4 longer race. Such is Zwift, I suppose.
I have to say, even with the rest day yesterday, the thought of doing another climbing ride today was not exactly appealing.
However, content with my effort on Sunday I let myself have this one as a recovery ride – by and large – and also opted to do this on the TT bike, though I think any hope of covering all the required kilometres on the ceramic speed mission are a bit of a long shot at this point.
A mistake I made today, right at the start, was to assume the ride set off at 14:10, rather than 14:01. As such I barely made it to the ride, and by the time I’d had a quick pre-ride toilet stop, I could hear the 10 second count down bleeps. Whoops.
Anyway, late or not, my plan remained the same, and as I was on a TT bike anyway, there would be no benefit of being in the draft.
For once, under my own measure – rather than relying on ERG – I managed to control myself and by-and-large, only do around 2.8w/kg for the first hour or so. Effectively from the start, to the end of the Jungle Circuit, I managed to control my pace pretty well.
This was partly due to self control, and partly due to tiredness – I simply didn’t want to go fast 🙂
One thing I was debating was doing the old “stop and change” routine. Swap out the TT bike for the mountain bike when I hit the jungle.
They are both needed for the ceramic speed mission goal.
However, in the end I couldn’t be bothered. I opted to just keep motoring on with the TT bike throughout the Jungle.
A nice thing today was that we did the reverse jungle circuit – so for once, it wasn’t quite so monotonous. It was still slow and clunky though.
I know I moan a lot about Zwift. I think it’s a hazard of using any software for long enough: you will find the bits that you don’t like, and repeated use irks you more and more.
One thing that winds me up is that misplaced KOM markers.
For example today, we hit the start of the Reverse KOM marker, then diverted to the Jungle Circuit.
As such when we exited the Jungle Circuit, we were no longer on the timed Reverse KOM.
I find this kind of thing so frustrating.
Where I’d done the rest of the ride at approx 2.8w/kg, I figured I’d go for 3.1w/kg on the climb.
This went well enough, though I have to admit I got a bit concerned towards the top when I thought we were continuing on up the Radio Tower, too.
Reaching the top I was happy enough with the ride. Not quite recovery, but certainly not killing myself either.
It was probably on the too intense side, all things considered.
Looking ahead to tomorrow, I’m hoping to get outdoors.
The reason being that – allegedly – there is going to be a heatwave here tomorrow. Heading for 25c, if you believe the weather man.
I’m planning on doing a long route down to the Fylde Coast, all in it’s about 60km. Things may change – it all depends on the weather, of course, but that’s the plan. As it’s country and coastal roads, there is little in the way of hills to contend with.
So as above, maybe this one was a little intense with that ride in mind. Hopefully not.
All in all, happy to get another 900 calories of work done. Also very happy with my control and pacing today. Lots of blue and green. The yellow is the Reverse KOM.
The “big” spike is me being stupid on the way down.
Not that it matters much on this occasion – because as above, we didn’t actually cover the Reverse Epic KOM segment – but did you hear the news about Strava and segments? Sad times.
