There’s no denying it, this years Tour of Watopia has some ambitiously sized routes. Certainly ambitious when it comes to week day riding, at least for me.
The short ride is Watopia’s Waistband – 26km and mostly flat.
The standard ride is Out and Back Again, 40km with 300m of climbing.
And the longer ride… well, that’s Big Foot Hills. 70km with 700m of climbing. Fun times.
So, not unsurprising then that the Short ride today, at 5pm GMT, had 1,000+ on there, whilst the other two were very much fewer in number.
I’m hoping to do the Longer ride on Sunday morning. A very much different pacing required for that one. I doubt I’ll get in the Standard ride as well this week. It’s a big ask. But never say never.
Anyway, with this one the plan was to basically treat it as an SST session. Aiming for ~230w or 3.5w/kg (ish), I did alright on sticking to this.
I’m probably over doing the number of higher intensity workouts / rides (and races) that I am taking part in lately.
In some ways I feel alright about this, because it all feels beneficial.
But I am also aware that it’s likely more strain on the body than I need to be taking, which may be putting me at a higher risk of injury, and is potentially not even as beneficial as I think it is.
As far as the ride itself – it was alright. There was a bit of banter, but not much. I tried my best to post a few bits to get a chat going but people weren’t super talkative today. Shame.
One interesting thing that was pointed out on this ride is that the hat might be an Easter Egg. It’s very Ukraine flag themed, shall we say. Needless to say that the person who raised this point got shot down. People very much do not like any politics on Zwift, which is fair enough.
All the same an interesting observation.
That’s technically Stage 2 in the bag. It’s ticked off the list, but I want to do one of the longer rides – and I have my eye on the Longer ride proper. That’s definitely one for the weekend though.
The challenge now is whether or not I can get an hour’s Zone 2 ride in tomorrow lunch time. Maybe. Fingers crossed.
Not often I say that about Zone 2 rides.
