Off we go then with the Tour of Watopia 2023. I’m a tad late to the party on this one. It started on Monday I believe, but with starting a new job this week along with feeling a bit under the weather, I’ve not had the spare capacity to do the Longer ride.
Yet.
The plan is to do the Medium and Longer rides this weekend. I’m way down on my usual distances at the moment for the week, but I will definitely catch up. For now I just wanted to get this one in the books, so to speak.
Being the Shorter ride, this one was the least busy of the three on offer at 5pm GMT.
That said, it was still well attended – perhaps partly because it’s Stage 1, and also because it’s a flat stage. I suspect the 5pm ride up the Epic KOM followed by the Alpe de Zwift won’t be quite so popular.
Anyway, that’s still very much to come. For now we were off on a lap of Tempus Fugit. At ~20km and pancake flat, along with a big group, this one promised to be speedy. I was aiming for 30 minutes, partly because it was coming up to tea time (or so I thought… wrongly, it turned out).
There were many transparent arches dotted along the route.
Each arch dropped a power up which, I think, was the same for everyone each time. It seemed everyone would get a Draft Van, or everyone would get an Aero Helmet, and so on.
The most fun arches were the ones that turned everyone into a sort of Bowser-like dinosaur. I’m not entirely sure what it was supposed to be, but I liked it.
In terms of an actual workout though, I really liked this one.
I’d forgotten, yet again, to switch my trainer difficulty back up to 100%.
What this meant was that I was hitting ~230w(ish) at 90 RPM, which equated to a sort of low threshold power output. I figured I’d just hold this, there or thereabouts, for the duration. And that turned out to be a sufficiently challenging workout.
Combine the two – fun on-screen stuff with a decent, but not killer workout, and I came away having really enjoyed this one.
I’m definitely looking forwards to ticking off the longer ride.
Also I’m quite pleased to see that whilst the Tour of Watopia 2023 is shorter in terms of total stages than say, the Tour de Zwift, that we get a full 7 days to see each stage out. And that means I can definitely fit all of them in, at the intensity I want, without feeling like I need to do too much alongside the new job and whatever else life throws at me.
All in then, pretty good stuff!
