Tour of Watopia 2023 | Stage 5 | Shorter

A bit like back in Stage 3, I opted to do the Tour of Watopia 2023 Stage 5 Shorter ride today, but do it as an ad-hoc SST session.

The aim is pretty simple, 5 minutes on, 5 minutes off.

It doesn’t always pan out like that. And of course, today was no different. But at least the first 20 minutes (or 4 blocks) kind of went to plan.

The route for this one was Sand and Sequoias, a short route at 23km or so, with a trip up Titan’s Grove KOM for fun. At least this time around we were taking on the “forward” variant, as whilst I’ve seemed to be up and down that route a lot lately, most of the time we have been on the Reverse KOM.

Setting off today we took the long route along Fuego Flats. That meant the first 20 minutes, roughly, seemed to be fine enough with the SST approach.

The one downside was I was only about 3 minutes into my second “off” block when we hit the bottom of Titan’s Grove. That meant my intervals went a bit screwy, but in some ways this worked out alright as it meant doing a higher effort after that short recovery, which was a nice variation on the theme.

After I’d ramped up Titan’s Grove though, I wasn’t in a good place to resume my workout approach so after that it kinda all just became a free ride / mish-mash.

This one ticks off all five stages of the Tour of Watopia 2023, which is quite nice. But I’m still going to do the Longer ride to “officially” see it out this weekend.

It’s looking like the weather won’t hold up for an outdoor ride tomorrow, which is a bit sad as it’s a 4 day week this time around, so tomorrow’s technically my Friday this week. It would have been good to get out for a recovery-ish ride after work.

As it stands though, I suspect it will be a 30 minute easy ride on the turbo, with maybe a ride out on Friday day time.