Weekly Review January 30th – February 5th 2023

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Each week I try to review and reflect on my previous week on the bike. This allows me to see how my fitness and ability is progressing on a wider timescale than day to day. For previous weekly reviews please click here. 

Overall a good week, finishing off the Tour de Zwift 2023, getting back into racing, and even a little foray outdoors. Hopefully more of the same in the week to come.

Here are this week’s rides:

It’s my default to dwell on the negatives, but I can’t help feeling a little disappointed I didn’t get to do all the Longer rides in the Tour de Zwift 2023. Due to injuring my knee mid Tour, I missed doing the Stage 4 Longer ride, and so maybe I will try to make that one up during the week ahead.

The thing with the make up week is that the ride times are all over the show. Usually it’s 9am for Stage 1, 10am for Stage 2, 11am for Stage 3, and so on.

When you have a set riding time in your day (usually dinner time for me), it’s a case of is there a ride that fits, rather than me waiting it out till the specific ride starts.

Actually though, I wrote that without having even checked Zwift.com, and it does look like this time around they are running each ride on 30 minute slots, not 1 hour slots. That did mean Stage 4 today began at 11am, or 3pm, or 7pm… so I guess if that’s the same tomorrow I could maybe do the 11am ride?

We shall see.

Probably the more fun bit for me though was getting back into Racing.

I did alright in the first of the two races during this week. That may be because I activated cheat mode:

I talked more about that in this post.

I’ll definitely be racing at that trainer difficulty in future. It’s a shame the UI doesn’t allow you to dial in a specific number – sliders are a bit of a garbage UI element for something like this. But hey, it’s better than nothing.

Switching back from ~15% to 100% for the following ride was a bit of a shock to the system.

Where this will come into its own is in how I perform on a longer race. It looks like Zwift’s February 2023 racing series is called Race Scotland, and takes in the new Scotland map. Honestly, I cannot avoid that country right now, much to my chagrin.

It will be interesting to take in all the new circuits though. Glasgow Crit Circuit sounds particularly interesting – I really like Crit City – so will be good to get another alternative route to ride.

Oh, and there’s a kit to unlock if you nail all the races this time around. Not sure that’s usually the case – as far as I know, it’s just a badge normally. Sadly I didn’t get my Flat Is Fast badge due to injury. Boo. No make up events there.

Speaking of new kits…

It turns out you can buy the kit from the Tour de Zwift 2023 for in real life rides.

I’m not going to link it, because I’m absolutely certain the link will go dead within 6 months. But if you are interested you can google for “Tour de Zwift 2023 x Pedal Mafia kit) – or browse to pedalmafia.cc and have a look around.

For reference the jersey is £117.00, and the odd socks are £17.00.

Personally I think the real jersey looks a lot better than the in-game one. I’m still not mad on it though.

And odd socks? That’s a hard no from me. Personally though I’m a trainer socks kinda guy on the bike, gotta show all my hairy legs or it’s not worth going out.

What do you reckon on the kit?

Weight-wise, still around the 66kg mark. God knows I’ve tried to put weight on, but it’s just not happening. I can eat all the crap I like, and it won’t go up. Some might think it’s a blessing but I find it a bit odd. I can tell you I was a right little fatty in my teens so I know it’s possible.

Not that I want to get fat, of course, but it would be nice to add a couple of kilos and see what happens to the power output.

Right then, plan for the week ahead:

  1. Get stuck into Race Scotland
  2. Do another MyWhoosh ride
  3. Do the make up ride for Stage 4 Longer Ride, if the time suits.

Oh, and find a job?

That’d be nice.

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