Late to the party this week. The new Zwift racing series for May is entitled Crit Club, and will no doubt be taking us on a tour of all the fastest crit circuits that Zwift currently has to offer. Should be a good month.
For today’s race we took on 3 laps (plus a comparatively sizeable lead-in) of Volcano Circuit Counter Clockwise (CCW).
I’m not used to racing on a Friday, so wasn’t too sure how the numbers might stack up. In my head I had it that the field size would be larger than usual. But that wasn’t really the case – about the usual really, somewhere between 40 and 50 riders in the B cat.
I don’t think I’ve raced on Volcano Circuit before. Thinking about it before the race I realised how good this circuit could be for racing. There’s a couple of little risers where action would take place each lap, but by and large it’s flat and fast.
Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t under any illusions of coming in the top 10, but I figured I might be in with a chance of seeing the front runners cross the finish line today.
Right out of the gates today I was hurting. Two days off the bike and I should have been fully rested. Where I went wrong was zero warm up. Whoops.
Yeah, paid the price on the lead-in for sure.
Being the CCW circuit, I was thrown for six as I expected the big part of the route to be the short, sharp switchback. Of course on the CCW route, that’s a down hill.
So where would the attacks come?
Right before the start / finish line. The lift up, followed by another little stint up to the line. After that it would settle down and we would rinse and repeat.
I was fairly lucky with feathers. At least on the first two laps. On the final lap I got an Aero instead, which really didn’t suit me much.
Keeping with the bunch right until the end, I was hovering around the front of the bunch as we hit the final climb with 800m still to go.
Holding on to the aero, I figured I would attack that little climb with my bare legs, before dumping the aero for the second riser and hopefully claw back a few spots as we went over the line.
That was a bad idea.
In hindsight, a better move might have been to drop the aero on the first climb to stay in the bunch as best I could, and then cling on and see where I came out. As it was, I ended up chasing and never really standing a chance of getting much back.
Ahhh well, yet more learning experiences.
Still, what does it matter?
A solid workout, albeit a fairly short one.
It’s looking like a bit of a shocker of a weekend, weather-wise. So I suspect it will be more structured Zwifting from here on out. We shall see. Not sure what to do though just yet.
I guess I’ll figure that out tomorrow.
