I was going to do a MyWhoosh ride today, but for insane patch size reasons, combined with what seems to be a bug in their updater, I gave up and opted for Zwift instead.
Yes, that’s right, a 13gb patch. And every time it got to 30mb it reset and began again from zero. Very bizarre.
I’m trying to get back into the routine of doing a climb on my Saturday ride, and Zwift’s Climb Portal is certainly helping with that.
On rotation today is another new one (for me) in the form of La Laguna Negra.
This one felt easier than Bealach na Bà last week, although last week it wasn’t 30c indoors. Today was an absolute sweat-fest.
For mechanical reasons I’m basically ‘stuck’ to turbo rides currently, and will be for all of this month. No big deal as the weather is due to turn tomorrow, with a whole week of heavy rain and thunder predicted.
But today, as all the rest of the week, has been a hot one.
A bit too hot for an indoor ride. I didn’t see that many union jacks out there in Watopia today.
Last week I opted for a good 20 minute warm up. This week I did some pre-ride recon and read over on Zwift Insider than La Laguna Negra is fairly easy going on the bottom half. It only gets steeper near the top.
I’d say that’s fair.
As such I opted to do my warm up on the climb. Maybe a bit nuts but due to that heat I’ve already mentioned, I wanted to make today as short as possible whilst still getting in a fairly decent session.
The aim was to take this almost as an SST session. 5 minutes hard, then 5 minutes easier, rinse and repeat to the top.
That didn’t work. It never does without ERG.
One ‘good’ thing about this climb is that it’s mostly straight up. There are one or two flat / blue bits, but mostly it’s a steady effort upwards. And never too taxing, either. Only a couple of the segments have another around 8%+, until the last segment, that is, which is a different game.
As has been the case now on several of these Saturday Climb Portal rides I struggled to hit the metrics I wanted in my head. At best I was putting out mid 230w stints, but as we hit the half way point this dropped to the low 220s.
It’s not looking too good for the FTP test at the end of this month, that’s for sure.
I did manage a fairly good uptick on the final segment, mostly because I wanted to get it over with. At one point I was out of the saddle with 200m or so left to go, and I had to sit back down at least 50m before the line as I’d misjudged the distance and demand of that final leg.
Probably the best comparison for this one would be against my effort up the Col du Platzerwasel. That’s a slightly harder climb, given that it covers 596m over 7.8km, whereas this one clocks in at 501m over 9km.
On the Col du Platzerwasel I managed 235w for 32:15.
Today I managed 227w for 32:01.
There’s a heat factor to this. It was overly hot in my room today. 30c is insane for me. I’m used to it being half that, often even less.
But still, it’s not promising given that the Platzerwasel was a month ago (almost exactly) and yet my form has clearly dipped again.
Sigh.
Still, one of the ‘easier’ Climb Portal climbs in my opinion.
