For this evening’s ride I took on Tuscany, Florence – City Trip, a Tacx Software video ride.
I had initially planned on riding another Tacx route – the London city ride. However, when I loaded that up, it turned out to be a GPS only route, which is akin to riding around on Google maps (not Google street view, but literally the top down map). No thanks.
Once again it would appear that I have had issues with recording the video during this ride.
I thought I had sussed it out – don’t use the 720p video downloads, but stream the ride instead. I streamed this ride, and still ended up with a stuttering video capture that has lost most of the frames.
At this point I’m guessing it’s purely hardware. As in, I need a dedicated PC for screen recording. That’s not happening any time soon, so for now, I will make do with what I have.
This ride is essentially a loop. You start at the top of a hill, descend, do a tour of Tuscany city center, and then head back out and back up the hill you initially descended.
Here’s the ride overview from Tacx:
Starting & ending up on the light climb of Fiesole which set the scene for the 2013 World championships. The route takes you down the climb through the streets & alleyways of the still mostly sleeping city before returning for the final fairly easy climb to the town of Fiesole where we started.
Tacx Software ride description
With no prior warm up, the initial descent – at about 5km in length – served as a way, of sorts, of spinning up the legs.
The descent itself was fairly steep – between 5 and 9% or so, with something like 7% average for sizable parts. As such it was hard to gain wattage, and easy to spin very fast.
Even in the hardest gear I was barely able to break 100w for a good few minutes.
Once descended, I had deduced from the top right route map that the route was, in effect, a loop. And that meant I’d have the pleasure of climbing up the long down hill I’d just descended again in about 12km’s time.
Hey, I’d come down it in about 7 minutes, maybe I could go back up in 7 minutes too?
One thing that threw me was the inclusion of that green jerseyed rider in the above screenshot.
I gather that who ever is filming these rides must have an odd contraption stuck to the front of his bike. This is evident as a large number of pedestrians clearly give the camera a funny look as he / she cycles past.
I figured this green jerseyed rider was the companion / guide / spotter, or similar. And I thought this as there was a really similar looking guy in the Amsterdam ride, also.
Anyway, that turned out to be a red green herring. He turned off after a while.
I like these rides as, although I get to do my own thing, there is plenty of new stuff to see.
One thing I really like about Zwift are the structured workouts. It would be awesome to be able to do e.g. Sweet Spot Training or similar on these Tacx video rides.
However, because I must have done a few hundred laps of Watopia by now, I’m kinda bored of the routes.
With the Tacx routes there’s lots of new stuff to see, and as it’s all real world, it’s much more interesting to me. Why not visit The Baptistry Of St John, or the Ponte Santa Trinita Bridge (built 1566) – it’s much more interesting to me than a virtual volcano.
The other cool thing about these Tacx rides is that many of them seem to have the full road feel element.
This is so cool. It’s one of the reasons I bought the Neo 2. Yes, it’s a gimmick in many regards, but it’s an immersive one. And these rides make way more use of it than Zwift has done.
You can see in the screenshot below, on the bottom right, how the pedal stroke analysis kinda goes loopy as you travel over the rough bridge cobbles. And you feel that directly through the pedals as you ride. Very cool.
Unfortunately, yet again, I had troubles with my Wahoo Tickr not synchronising / being recognised by the Tacx Software. This seems to be a constant problem now, and there’s no way to re-sync in ride (as far as I know).
Therefore, unfortunately, I did not capture my heart rate data during this ride.
This is frustrating as that information is particularly useful and interesting to me.
What I tried to do is keep a steady cadence of around 95rpm for large parts of this flat route.
This really didn’t work out so well for me, as is so often the case on free rides.
However, after about the first half, I started to become increasingly concerned that I might blow myself up too early if I tried to keep up this pacing.
I ended up stopping for a quick toilet break about half way along, and then when back on the bike, took a slightly more laid back approach, thinking ahead to the forthcoming climb.
This was probably a fair plan, as the climb itself ended up being a little more intense than I had originally planned for tonight’s ride.
Loved these little detours down the various streets and alleyways
After the toilet pit stop, I realised I was potentially going to catch the other real life rider on the course ahead of me. I didn’t go excessively hard, but began using this person as a marker, or target, in order to see how close I could get to passing him / her.
Spoiler alert: I did not pass this rider.
But it certainly helped motivate me. In some ways I wish I had put some opponents on for this ride. But then, I was technically supposed to be having a slightly easier ride than usual tonight, on account of feeling a bit thrashed as of late.
One cool thing about this ride was that during the filming, a Gran Fondo was taking place, so there were tons of other cyclists about. This led to some interesting action on the climb.
Speaking of which, the return up the slope was now upon me. What had felt like it would be a long flat section had suddenly disappeared alarmingly quickly in the final 2-3km, and then it was time to put in a bit of a shift and make my way back up the hill.
Like a sort of baby brother of the Cormet de Roselend this climb was, by me, split into two smaller chunks.
There was the first half (slightly less than half of the total, up to the first green slope on the bottom HUD map), and then the second more intense half.
The max slope would be 9.1%, but the average was only 5% or so. This is significantly down on a typical weekend climb, so by comparison felt a lot easier. Also, distance wise were talking only 5km, compared to a typical weekend ride at 3x that, or more.
I managed to motor through the first part of the climb, maintaining a good cadence at, or around, 95rpm. Of course, I was in the little ring for this work. This put me around 220w or so.
As I hit the middle flat section I kinda messed up.
The flat lasted a little longer than I expected. This was enough to get me back into the big ring, but that totally messed up my rhythm. Hitting the start of the next climb momentarily left me all flustered, and I made a bit of a hash of it all.
Much like last Sunday’s Cormet de Roselend climb, I once again had gone too hard too early. This is frustrating, but fortunately, was of a lot less significance on this particular effort.
Having done a bit of research, I would compare this climb to Zwift’s London map with the Leith Hill climb. The few times I have done that climb for real, I have made a real mess of it. Not quite so today. I was happy enough with my performance, and getting 250m or climb in, along with 540 calories of work done on a Thursday night is a big win for me.
I’m debating whether to give myself a slightly easier, but maybe slightly longer climb on this Sunday as a result of already doing some elevation on the week.
Interestingly, this ride came out at a TSS of 80, whereas the 2x 15’s last week came out at 81.
I think that’s fair, but I also think that I completely messed up my initial ideas for this ride. Ahh well. Tomorrow is rest day, and it gives me time to think about Saturday, and maybe even Sunday’s climb in more depth. Lucky me.
