The Climb Portal schedule doesn’t seem to change that much. I had an opportunity to ride The Crow Road last weekend, but passed it up in favour of hitting up Alto del Aguila on MyWhoosh instead.
This weekend I saw that The Crow Road was still available, and so it had to be done.
Actually, it’s not that bad really this one.
250m of climb over 7km, at an average of 3.5%.
I think that’s a tad deceptive as the first kilometre is practically flat, so really it’s 250m over 6km, which is about 4.15%, but let’s not get into that.
The unusual part of The Crow Road is that after that first kilometre, you turn to the right and off in the distance you can see the finish line. From there you take a left turn and head out bound, before turning back in around the half way point. But it does make it seem like it’s going to be shorter than it is.
Maybe that’s why I made such a hash of this effort.
I could see, early on, thanks to the Zwift Climb Portal stats, that my ETA was around the 20 minute mark.
20 minutes?
Oh, that sounds like an absolutely perfect time to give myself a mini FTP test. What could go wrong?
Well… nothing. For the first ten minutes or so.
Then it went south.
In a sort of harsh wake up call that striving for 250+ watts average over 20 minutes is currently a long way out of my reach, I came crashing back down into the ~230’s from the half way point.
Perhaps I could have managed this better, sticking in the 240’s for those three sections between 8 and 6.
But I didn’t. And I couldn’t keep the power on.
I’d had the warm up. I’d eaten my lunch before the ride. I felt as fresh as I could do.
Still, I couldn’t perform.
It’s not looking good.
From the half way point things picked back up a bit. I managed to get back into the 230’s and finish strong with another 250. But we’re only talking 1.5 minute efforts here on average. I finished the whole route in 18:03, so not even the full 20…
Yikes.
Anyway, glad to have ticked that one off. Not the most challenging of climbs on Zwift by any means, but based on my performance I’d say one that shows how far I still have left to go.
