Virtual Racing

Over the Easter break I ended up having a couple of monster weeks, with 20+ hours of training per week. That was made up of 15 hours a week of turbo work and 5-6 hours of walking with Sue. After the second week I was absolutely shattered. To be honest, if just crept up on me. Quite a few of the guys and gals on Tritalk were getting heavily involved in Zwift as well as a few clubmates and I got caught up in the excitement. While work has been busy during the lockdown period, with a lot less commuting and other work commitments it's been very easy to get onto the turbo and work on my ftp.

My week has evolved as Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays being TrainerRoad sweetspot or threshold sessions, while Tuesdays and Thursdays have been steady club group rides on Zwift, with a longer ride on Sunday. it seems to be working and the mix of Zwift and TrainerRoad has kept things interesting.

Two weeks ago, I ended up doing The Uber Pretzel, one of the longer rides on Zwift. I thought it would take me around 4 hours, but in the end it was around 5. I even had a coffee stop at 2 hours, so the proceeding 3 became my longest ever continuous stint on a turbo. My gooch took a bit of a battering, but Zwift most definitely makes the time go by a lot more quickly than it normally would.

I dialled it down last Sunday, with a much more manageable 2.5 hours, riding The Hilly Route. It was quite cool, when riding up the volcano, I ended up in a group with Ritchie Porte, Wout Poels, Cam Wurf and few other Trek Segafredo riders, who were doing some gentle Zwift miles. I know that it was only in a virtual world and I was only riding alongside their avatars, but it was still quite cool.

Leading Ritchie Porte out, up the volcano #fanboy

So with quite a few hours under my belt, I decided  to skip the club ride last night and encourage a couple of clubmates to ride a crit race with me. 12 laps of a short, flat loop, which should take about an hour. It was a real blast. I managed to get into a group of about 15 riders, running in about 30th place of 90 or so riders and over the course of 9 laps or so, that slowly whittled down to 7 of us. In Zwift racing, powerups are quite key and I got a ghost powerup at halfway, which I decided to keep until the end. the ghost allows you to disappear for 10 seconds so the other riders cannot see your avatar and my plan was to use the downhill section to kick off the front of the group and get a gap, to hopefully hold until the line. It almost worked; but not quite! I put in my kick and got a gap, but not big enough to get away fully, so 2 other riders pipped me on the line. I simply don't have the big power numbers to be a sprinter. Anyway, top 10 in my category, which was nice.

All that said, I ended up averaging over 300 watts for well over 20 minutes and my ftp bumped from 274 to 285watts! Only 3 watts down on my all time ftp best. Even better, I know there is still quite a bit more to come and a 300watt ftp actually looks achievable. Stoked!

Getting there, bit by bit