Bad times. As covered before, I have been using a Gorilla Pod to mount my phone on my bike handlebars which I can then easily see the Zwift Companion App whilst riding. This makes it easy to take screenshots for this blog, along with quickly changing camera angles, giving ride ons, and stuff like that.
Unfortunately however, as I sweat like Niagara Falls when riding, particularly when climbing – stood up on the pedals, and over the bars – I tend to drip all over my phone.
And during my last Innsbruck KOM climb, I sweated all over my phone and afterwards, it started acting all weird. For instance, the home / lock screen would never allow rotation. Until after that ride. Or another example, it kept activating car mode. Or another example, the headphone jack no longer worked.
Oh dear.
Anyway, I started this ride as normal. Plugging in my phone, and then immediately noticing the screen was flickering like mad. I even brought my wife over to confirm that it wasn’t just me witnessing a glitch in the Matrix.
Alas, no. Something told me to unplug the phone from the charging cable. And as I did so… the smell. That typical sizzling electrical smell that says: “yeah, that’s broke for good.”
I still had 35% battery and managed to upload all my photos, videos, and other bits and pieces. But the phone is done for. What a shame.
For this ride, then, I had to use the iPad as a makeshift Zwift Companion App. And it’s so obvious that Zwift don’t expect people to do this. It’s just the iPhone variant of the app, in a small rectangle with a huge black border. Pretty poor.
Anyway, it worked OK enough. And so, I got riding.
For this ride I took on Innsbruck KOM reverse. As such, I hit the Innsbruck Reverse Sprint, a 200m flat sprint over which I managed to put in my best ever time (to the very best of my knowledge). Not a bad way to start the ride. I don’t think I got out of the 500 watt range.
Having never ridden a full lap of the UCI Worlds Circuit in reverse, this one was kind of a new one on me. Yesterday I completed the UCI Worlds Circuit forward variant, and have done that before as well. But going backwards was fun.
This short section of uphill used to be among the most challenging climbs I’d ever had to do. I remember the first few times I hit that uphill and questioned my life choices. It was nice to see so many people enjoying the hill as I zipped down it for a change.
The outbound circuit rejoined the usual forward KOM route as much like Zwift’s London KOMs, the route out to the hills is the same, you just turn left or right depending on the climb you’re taking on.
Zwift’s Innsbruck Reverse KOM is shorter and a bit steeper in terms of average gradient than the Innsbruck Forward KOM. This would be 5.7km with 396m of climb at an average of 7%.
There were noticeably fewer folk tackling the reverse KOM, and more on that noticeably fewer number towards the end of this ride report.
I like Innsbruck. I like the scenary, the routes are visually interesting, and that’s a great help in keeping my mind off the effort involved in turning the pedals over when hitting a 14% gradient.
During this ride I got back to thinking about the Zwift Climbing Difficulty setting. I’ve linked to this before, I’m sure, but this video on the subject is really interesting in my opinion:
I choose to run the 100% difficulty, and so gearing choice is really important to me. Also, running out of gears is a thing 🙂
Generally there were fairly few climbers out there on this route. This meant a lot of the time the Zwifters Nearby board would report people coming down the hill rather than riders up ahead. This feels a little confusing. Maybe an option to disable riders nearby but on the other side of the road would be nice.
Most of the riders seemed to be doing structured workouts.
Much like the Innsbruck Forward KOM, there are short segments of relatively flat road which, on fresher legs, would mean I could try to push on and keep my KOM time as low as possible.
However, after yesterdays climb, I just didn’t have the legs to grind and keep close to 200w. I found a lot of the time I’d fall back to 170-180w. The dripping sweat was there though. Typical.
One factor I was giving some mental consideration too during this climb was my weekly distance goal of 100km.
Is it a fair goal to ride 100km of Fuego Flats in a week when compared to 100km with 1500m+ of elevation?
Is fairness even the right way to think about this? I’m interested in the work out. It does feel like I can cheat myself to game the stats though. And Zwift has no way to track a goal about climbing, as best I am aware.
Having never completed the Innsbruck Reverse KOM before, seeing a time board pop up telling me I was on track for a sub 30 minute time didn’t tell me too much. It’s not a fair comparison to compare against my forward KOM times.
Whilst climbing away, I bumped into C. Polazzo who was attacking the hill in short, sharp sprints. The power figures this person was putting out were whoppers. Fair play.
I guess fighting 15% hills is a great way to practice sprints if you’re doing it correctly. Last time I tried such things I stressed my knees very badly.
Having done the Innsbruck Forward KOM a few times I knew seeing the water mouth man statue was the signal that the end was very much in sight. Mostly at this point the run in is fairly flat. Well, after some of those 14% climbs, a 5% seems flat anyway.
I did my best to sprint in at the end but my legs were shot.
Happy to come in under 30 minutes. Even though I’ve never done the climb before, coming in under a big whole number felt good. Good enough to be in the top 50%.
Down hill was basically just totally eased off. I felt thrashed. Also I needed to get off the bike fairly urgently to do the kids tea, and get ready to go out again.
Zipping down I hit my 100km riding goal for the week. I was hoping to have another ride on Sunday, but as I sit here writing this, that didn’t happen. I don’t regret it. Busy weekends full of family birthdays and housewarmings are what they are.
Once down the hill, the Reverse UCI Lap timer kicked in, and I tried as best I could to push on.
Alarmingly, I noticed there was only one other time on the board for the Reverse UCI World’s Lap, and realisation kicked in. I might just get a jersey!
I couldn’t work out whether I had misjudged how much distance I still had left, or whether I really would be taking the jersey. I just kept on keeping on, and hoped that no one would nip in before me and steal my thunder.
This has happened to me before on the Epic KOM Reverse.
And woo! They didn’t. I managed to be the fastest of two riders, winning myself the much coveted (by me) orange jersey.
Now, let me be completely clear:
I am under no illusion that my time was distinctly average. And that I do not stand a chance of winning a jersey on the more popular circuit choices any time soon.
But to hell with that, just look at my threads!
Bringing me quickly back down to Earth, I managed to come in 4% slower on my next sprint attempt.
Oh well. I was very happy to have on the orange jersey, even if just for a short while. Hopefully the next time I win a jersey it will be in a little bit more of a competitive field.
And with that, I ended the ride.
Unsurprisingly not a super strong one. I wasn’t trying to set new records on this run. No attempt to smash my 20 minute personal best. Just a bit of exercise to keep the legs happy.
I do enjoy Innsbruck but am looking forward to a different map for my next ride. I’d still really like to get another 50km ride in, but that’s hard on a weeknight, so that will have to wait. Again.
I feel like another workout will be the next ride for me.
Getting 655 calories burned was a good way to set myself up for a night ahead on the beers. At least some damage mitigation had been pre-emptively put in place.
All in all, not a bad ride to end the week.
Now all I need is a new phone. Thanks Zwift! 😉