Each week Zwift sends me an email summarising my activity for the week. For previous weekly reviews click here.
This last week consisted of 3 rides, of which two were group rides, and one was a race.
All rides last week were under the banner of Tour de Zwift 2020.
These rides consisted of:
- Tuesday – Stage 5 (New York) Group Ride
- Thursday – Stage 5 (New York) Race (Category C)
- Saturday – Stage 6 (Richmond) Group Ride
Last week started off with a family bereavement and I turned to the bike for solace.
Riding the various climbs and sprints as part of a group of over 800 other riders was helpful in letting me both forget, and remember. I don’t want to dwell on this any further on here, so will leave it there.
Thursday’s New York race night was – possibly – my best ever performance on Zwift.
I’ve found the continuous cycle of group ride > race > group ride > race to be both exhausting but rewarding. It certainly helps to have a fairly standard routine at this point, even though we are coming into the final stages of this year’s Tour.
I was really pleased with my performance on Thursday. I tried hard, and was rewarded for my effort. It felt like the result was well won. Well, if you consider 50th place a win.
Taking a rest day between two hard Tour stages seems to have become the norm, bumping my weekly rest days up from 2 to 3 for the past few weeks.
Going into Saturday I had a family illness to contend with, so had more time than usual to spend on the bike. As such I decided to ride the Stage 6 group ride a day early (Saturday afternoon rather than the planned Sunday morning).
Things were looking pretty good for me during this ride. I’d managed to cling on to a fast paced bunch and had I not lost my chain at the end of the first climb on the second lap, I think I could have finished within the top 400. Disappointing, but as ever in life, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.
I’ve really enjoyed the Tour de Zwift 2020 so far, and despite a few technical and mechanical issues, I feel I’ve progressed my fitness level up a little bit in the process.
There’s another ride I’d like to take part in once the final group rides and races are over and done with, and that is the Vätternrundan group ride. Had I not been feeling quite so lazy on Sunday morning, I would have been up and out of bed for the 08:30 GMT start time. Maybe next week. Or… the week after. There’s still a few weeks to get involved.
I’m not anticipating too much change in the forthcoming week ahead. I have the remaining Stage 6 (Richmond) race to complete, and then both the Stage 7 (Yorkshire) group ride and race to contend with. That’s a fairly full week, but thanks to a change in my work situation, I do also have several more hours to spare thanks to no more pointless commuting back and forth to Wigan each day. Great Success!
By the way, if you’re wondering where the stats, graphs, and figures come from in this weeks post – check out Golden Cheetah. It’s a really cool piece of software, and whilst I don’t profess to understand that much of it at this stage, it certainly seems to have all the bells and whistles I think most anyone could need.