Something went wrong today.
I was late on the bike, and so the ride had already started – but only by 10 seconds or so. I expected to be dumped into the starting pens, but was instead dropped into the already-in-progress ride with pedal assist.
The route today should have been the Big Loop, taking in the Epic KOM, and then the Jungle Circuit, for a total of ~40km. I was anticipating a ride time of 1h 15m approx. Of the two big parts of the ride, the Epic KOM was what I was looking forwards too, with a lot less enthusiasm for the Jungle Circuit.
However, very quickly into the ride I got turned off the route and sent on my own way. For a short period of time I expected the game to “catch up” somehow and move my rider back to the route with everyone else… but that wasn’t to be.
As a result I was sent on my own personal Tour of Watopia Stage 5 Longer Ride.
🎱 A magical mystery tour. 🎱
🪲 A bug. 🪲
Or, 🥚an Easter Egg 🥚 … ?
It was, initially, pretty annoying. I’d got my bike back on the turbo, was wearing my tatty indoor kit, and was in the mindset of doing a Zwift session, even though outside it’s lovely weather and I could have happily taken an hour’s outdoor ride instead. Stopping and swapping would be so disruptive as to not be worthwhile.
So I plodded on.
After a bit of a detour around the map, I seemed to find myself on the Hilly Loop.
This isn’t a route I do out of choice.
But today I got to do four repeats.
I was somewhat expecting it to send me on the route that the B / Standard ride would be taking. Not sure why. But no, after I’d done one Hilly Loop, and it started me around on the same route again, I knew I was in for repeats.
In my head, I figured I’d see it out for the distance. On the clock today we had the 40km or so, with, I think, 600m of climbing. I figured I would do my ride to hit the same distance, and see where I came out in terms of distance climbed.
And so that was it really, repeats of the Hilly Loop.
Not the most enjoyable as an entirely solo ride, but I tried to get the most out of it all the same.
My method was to treat each climb of the Zwift KOM as a 5 minute threshold effort, and then aim to do as much of the rest of the lap as possible at tempo.
That definitely got progressively harder, and I certainly found myself thinking that the lap felt mostly up hill. I reckon in some ways I’d rather do that lap in reverse. Get the climb out of the way, and coast for the rest of the lap 🙂
Anyway, that’s me done with the Tour of Watopia. Yes, it wasn’t the ride I was meant to do, but it’s the one I did and I’m not going to spend another 1h 15m+ on the turbo tomorrow when the weather’s looking good outdoors. Pretty tired actually, may just skip it altogether.
