Tour of Watopia 2019 – Stage 1 – Glow In The Night

What’s the most fun you can have riding 30km in your dining room on a grey and gloomy Sunday morning? If you answered: Touring Watopia with 800 other indoor cyclists, then you’d be absolutely right.

843 riders!

I was nervous about this ride. Would I be able to finish it? Would I be dead last — or dead, and last? Would all the technical stuff work, connecting, battery not dying, etc?

On the technical front, everything went smoothly. Or as smoothly as you can expect an iPad to handle showing hundreds of other Zwift tron bikes and riders on screen at once.

The big question I had up front was: how would I get into the ride? If you aren’t aware, just join Watopia, and then Zwift will prompt you to join:

Once I’d clicked the Let’s Go! button the following sight awaited me:

Even on the iPad, with it’s fairly minecraft-esque graphics, this looked really cool. I’d have loved to have seen this in 4k. It is frustrating to have a really nice, and completely unused gaming PC sat upstairs, and then going full on Ryan Air spec on the graphics downstairs.

Anyway, as I’d joined with only 3 minutes or so to spare, I got a very brief 20-50w spin on before the big countdown clock reached 00:00 and we were off:

A bunch of riders slammed it out of the start line. I certainly didn’t. My plan was to average my FTP — about 145w — for the entire race. I figured this would be a good test of my guesstimated FTP.

A few weeks ago, if you had asked me to ride at an average of 140-150w for an hour, I would have thought you were quite crazy. But here we are, about 4 weeks later, and I felt like it was achievable.

Very early on, the pack had already started to separate out into a few distinct bunches. I seemed to gravitate around the ~500th place, and figured this might be a suitable target to strive for at the end of the ride.

What I didn’t like was that because Zwift saw this ride differently to a free-ride, I couldn’t give Ride Ons! very easily at all. I tried my best. I like the ease of clicking the circle over my arrow to give Ride On!’s to everyone around me. That wasn’t possible here.

Within the first 5km came the first of what I remember as being three climbs. I distinctly remember counting the meters, knowing the ride’s total climb was 260m (give or take) so was happy to deduct each metre from the total along the way. Sooner or later it would be all downhill, I figured… 🙂

Climbing with this many riders was absolutely epic

After the effort of the climb came the first zippy downhill descent. As I’ve done before on longer rides, I just try to keep pedalling, up hill or down.

Dusty Rhodes.

For as long as possible, I tried to stick with a pack of riders. Then someone said, via chat, that there was no drafting enabled. So I figured… heck, what’s the point? I reverted to my game plan. Keep grinding out at 140-150w, and see what happens.

By about 1/3rd of the stage, the pack was starting to completely separate. I’ve not experienced anything like this before, so this was really interesting to me. I wondered if more distinct bunches would have swarmed together if drafting were a thing.

There were some really cool sights to see along this ride. I’ve not experienced most of this game just yet, and a large chunk of this ride is usually off limit to low tier newbs like myself.

After about 20km I have to admit that the rest is a bit of a blur. At one point I felt very lightheaded. I often wonder how I’d fare out on the real roads, because a significant portion of my rides are often head down, eyes closed, just pushing. Thank God for a lack of on-coming road traffic.

Then we were almost home.

At this point I had found a really nice rhythm. I was around 140-150w, and my legs felt like they could keep going for the remaining distance without serious issue. I remember being really happy that I’d broken into the top 500 but was fairly confident the pack around me were pacing themselves for a sprint finish.

Just before the finish line I managed to meet my set goal of 75km for the week. I knew ahead of time that if I finished this ride, I’d complete the goal. Pretty happy with that, as I had three rest days this week.

And then it was there. The finish arch was in sight. I dropped a gear and pushed with whatever I had left. It’s not a race, I had told myself, but my entire nature makes me forget all that fluff and compete for the line.

I put in an effort to get over that line. And when I had recovered enough to look up, I was really happy to finished in 483rd place.

I gave it my best. Not my absolute all, but certainly 90%. I’m always conscious of blowing up, and would rather ride every day at 80% effort than 1 day at 100% and then have to take a week off.

A whole 18 minutes off the pace. That’s fine for me. The person who won had finished when I was about 2/3rds of the way around the map. I remember a message in the chat: “ciao”, and I knew the first person had already crossed the line. Top effort:

I’m super happy with my effort. Happy to have completed. Happy to have come in the top 500. Happy to have taken part.

Also, today I learned, the TSS man goes above 100 😀

Word to the wise: don’t mess with your gear indexing the night before a big ride. I had a horrible phantom shift going on as a result. My own fault. Silly me.

Overall very happy. Going to feel super easy riding my morning 10km tomorrow, I imagine 🙂

Really looking forwards to the next stage now.

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