Today I experienced the WeWatt bike wait again. The first time I experienced it was when flying from Alicante to Geneva and the second time is when I was waiting to meet someone for lunch today. The principle is very simple. If you see that a wewatt bike is free for you to use you simply sit on the seat and start pedalling. The first two or three strokes are difficult but after that the resistance is minimal.
Wait and Charge
The beauty of the Wewatt bike wait is that while you’re waiting for people you usually play with your phone or with another device. In this situation, you’re waiting but as you’re waiting the battery level on your phone is going up rather than down. The longer you wait the higher the charge on your phone and the higher your physical fitness.
Not that strenuous
If you are used to cycling then the WeWatt bike does not offer enough resistance once you have given it inertia. You have to reduce your cadence in order not to be windmilling. For me getting the right cadence is a challenge. I would like to be able to change the resistance. I would like for the whole revolution of the pedals to exert force. During a ten minute session, I burned around 48 calories. I would need to spend 110 minutes on a WeWatt bike to burn 550 calories. On a normal bike, I would burn that in half an hour or less, depending on the terrain and effort.
Charge Produced
During the ten minute session, I charged the phone by about ten percent. It would take a theoretical 100 minutes to charge a phone fully. I do not see many people staying on one of those bikes for that long. I would like to try charging a laptop with this bike and I would like a home desk version. For the home desk version, I would want the option to increase to resistance to generate more power and charge devices sooner.
Yesterday I set off for a bike ride planning to go from Nyon to Gland, and then up and around before heading back to Geneva and then from around Versoix riding back to Nyon.
Instead of this I rode from Nyon to Gland and decided to go further and once at Gland I rode a little further and I ended up in Rolle. In Rolle I continued going thinking I’ll turn off and head to the top of Aubonne and ride to Geneva. Instead I went up to the Signal de Bougy and from there enjoyed the ride back down towards the foot of the Jura. I continued this way and when I got twards Trelex I ran out of water.
I thought about stopping at the petrol station but didn’t think “If I continue to La Rippe and Divonne I can find a water fountain. Eventually, I did, in Crassier. I took on a little water and cycled on the cycling/walking path to Divonne, went around part of the lake and then headed back to Switzerland. Once in Switzerland I turned right and headed for Versoix via the top route. I went down the road that passes by the observatory and then at the roundabout near the swimming pool I turned left and when I got to the intersection where I had to choose between Mies and the petrol station or going left I decided to go left.
By this point of the ride I was running out of energy to pedal. I stopped for a minute or two and then set off again. I was running really low on energy and I had just enough strength to keep moving forward. When I was crossing Borex towards Signy I was feeling so tired that even my arms were fatigued. I really felt low in energy. I finally made it to the station, got an electrolyte drink, some chocolate and headed home.
When I got home I collapsed on the couch but that wasn’t enough so I lied on the floor for a few minutes, just to rest a bit. It’s rare for me to exhaust myself like this. I did do two of my regular rides in a single ride.
I did cycle up from the lake side to the Signal de Bougy. I did race one postal bus down a hill and try to go faster than a TPN bus as it crossed the border. In theory I should have stopped around Trelex when I ran out of water but didn’t.
According to the Suunto watch it will take me 89 hours to recover. I’d call that a success. I went from wanting to do a fourty kilometre loop to doing an 80 kilometre loop, with a nice climb thrown in.
I was probably tired because I did this 80km ride on two pieces of money cake, without a proper lunch. 😉 This circuit took me about three and a half hours with no stopping for the first hour and a half or even beyond. With two or three snacks I would probably do this ride without suffering so much.
The first time I climbed up to La Barillette on a bike it took me two and a half hours. This time it took one hour and sixteen minutes. I was going so slowly that I had to work to keep the bike upright. Since then I have gone from a mountain bike with tyres that weren’t pumped enough and soft suspension to the same bike with slick tires, hardened suspension and higher pressure in the tyres. I then swapped that bike two or three years later and tried the same climb. I struggled with the road bike as well. I had to stop at least two or three times. I also found that clipped in pedals on such steep gradients are a hindrance because you can’t stop until the flatter bits.
This time I wore normal shoes and I set off from around Nyon. I cycled up to the start of the climb and i just started climbing. Above Cheserex I already had to stand on the bike to get enough thrust, then sit down, and then repeat. As I went up I saw two or three groups. One group set off just as I was getting to them and the second stopped where the first had been.
I like having a group in front of me. The group in front gives me a goal. It gives me a pace. I want at the minimum to keep up with them and ideally to overtake them. The person I used for pacing gave up within the first four to six kilometres. I then continued at my own pace as the other people were now a long distance away.
As I go up this hill I often daydream and my mind wanders to something completely different. It’s the closest I’d get to meditation. You’re making a physical effort but the body is so used to it that the mind has time to think of other things. I don’t remember what I was daydreaming about.
I’m used to doing this climb in the heat of summer when it’s 37°c or more. This time it was no more than 20 or so. I didn’t need to take two litres of water with me but I would have been happy with a rain coat and a third layer. The reason for this is that the beautiful weather I set off in turned overcast and cold.
As I got closer to the top I could feel the temperature begin to drop, and i felt the need to close the zips, to preserve heat. I even thought of putting my spare layer on. I continued.
When I set off you could see the top. By the time I got back down this is what it looked like.
When you’re climbing you know what your previous times were and during this time I got to a certain point where i saw that I was going to beat my previous best times by a nice margin so it encouraged me to keep going, but also not to stop and rest, and not to wait for two cars to figure out how to pass each other. I cycled through the grass to overtake them.
When I finally got to the top I saw people get out of their cars, smoke cigarettes and talk loudly. I had two Balistos and then headed back down. The view was so bad that I didn’t take any pictures.
As much as you think you suffer during the way up, which I didn’t this time, going down is the difficult bit. When you’re going back down you’re cold and you’re not doing much. You’re letting gravity undo the work that you just spent an hour doing.
My tyres have over 4000km in them so as i went down the hill I was slower than I needed to be. The surface was also wet and therefore could be slippy. I was holding the brakes for a good portion of the descent, to such an extent that I thought this was a good finger strengthening exercise.
Just before I got to the pond my rear tyre suffered a puncture. I can see two marks where I think a thorn or some other object punctured the tyre and deflated it within seconds. It didn’t matter as I had a spare tyre with me.
This winter I changed tyres frequently for the indoor trainer so the process has become automatic. What I especially enjoyed about changing a tyre on the side of a mountain slope is that you don’t have to worry about getting the floor dirty. Within minutes the tyre was changed and I could continue the descent.
This ride is unique because the night before I decided to do this climb we were discussing a via ferrata with two friends but they don’t have the equipment. The compromise was going to climb indoors but I didn’t feel like doing that because 1. the weather was nice and because 2. there are free sports to be enjoyed. I woke up that morning, opened the blinds and because of what a beautiful and warm day I saw it would be I decided to go for a bike ride and enjoy it. It felt so good to get on the bike after several days, or even weeks of not riding.
I was fully within the moment yesterday. I profited from the good weather, I set a goal and I achieved it, and I lived in the now, rather than later. This is rare for me. This ride, despite it’s physical nature, was relaxing.
During a recent walk I noticed that I could hear birds chirping, that the sun was shining and that spring seemed to be booting up. The weather held until Saturday so the conditions were ideal for a nice bike ride. The ride started at around 0840, with frost on the ground and an Outdoor Air Temperature (OAT) of around 1°c.
Usually I ride alone but for once I met with a Strava user and we rode at his pace rather than mine. This is a rare luxury. Usually I push myself for the duration of the ride. I try to ride at threshold for as much of the ride as possible. This ride was at a more leisurely pace.
We rode up from Nyon to Luins and from Luins through the vineyards towards Aubonne towards Apples, Bière and then back down towards Echandens. This involved riding through Springtime vineyards. Below us the U-shaped glacial trough was blanketed in mist, as you can see from the two images.
Shortly after taking this picture we had a short, hard climb. The gradient for the climb goes up to 24 percent. This climb requires strength to get up. I had already encountered this climb but from the other side, heading downwards. At the time I thought that I would never want to do this climb in the opposite direction.
As if this wasn’t hard enough it peaks at 28 percent.
This is the type of climb where you have to be used to clipped pedals. If you run out of steam and need to stop you have milliseconds before you stop and fall over. I rode near the wall so that if I ran out of steam I could rest against the wall. It is a character building climb.
Luckily after this climb it gets easier again.
We continued towards Pampigny and from Pampigny headed down for Morges. It amused me that we passed by rocspot. Rocspot is an indoor and outdoor climbing gym where people can climb year round. It is one of the best climbing gyms of the region.
The route from Morges to Nyon along the lake is relatively flat and more relaxing. There was no wind during the entire ride and the temperature was low enough not to need to rehydrate constantly. I drank just half a bottle. In summer I would have emptied two of them.
If you have several hours to spend on a bike ride then this is a nice ride. For the most part it is a moderate ride with gradual gradients, little traffic until you get back to the lake side, and nice landscapes. There are a number of places where you could stop for a drink or a snack and it gets you within easy reach of Lausanne, should you want to interrupt the ride, and take the train home. It is a nice warm-up for those thinking of doing the nearby cols. I will do this ride again.
This morning I completed Stage 9 of the Tour de Zwift. I have now finished the challenge. In the process I went from riding on the shorter events during the first stages to taking the long options for at least the last two stages.
A slow start before ramping up.
I don’t start the stage as fast as others. It takes me a few minutes to warm up and I have a psychological need to know that I’m over half way through a stage before I start pushing. I got two personal records on the last stage, personal record for at least one lap and although I was down to 420th place at the end of the first lap I was able to gain on other riders. I finished in the early to mid 300s so a gain of at least 50 places.
The Fun of competition
When I’m hiking I’m often at the front of a group until I get to about 3200m and then I slow down and eventually get towards the middle or the back. With Zwiftevents it is the opposite. I start weak and then gradually warm up and overtake. It’s usually by the second sprint that I start to pedal harder. I went from putting out 140+ watts for the first lap to 170 and then from there to 240 or more.
I think that my body acclimatises to putting out a certain amount of power on a certain gear and when that starts to feel easy I go to a harder gear, and then a harder gear after that. I reach the sprint at over 200 watts and ramp up my cadence to 150 strokes per minute, if the data is correct and I sprint through and get a PR. Today it happened twice in the last two laps. I’m happy about this because it means that I had enough in reserve to push through right until the end.
The Final kilometre
The final kilometre was fun. We were at least four to six riders and we pushed each other to go faster. Eventually they broke off from me and I finally started to sprint really hard and caught up with them again. It’s a shame that I don’t record the screen as I race. It would have been fun to see this particular end.
For the last 960 metres of the race, I was putting out an average of 289 watts, with a peak of 400 watts for 30 seconds. This might not sound like much when you compare it to professional riders but I can see definite progress since I started Zwifting. I went from a cadence of around 70-80 strokes per minute to an average of 97 strokes per minute during this stage. I have gone from struggling to generate 200 watts for a minute to being able to generate 200 watts for longer and longer periods of time. I was able to maintain 400 watts for at least 30 seconds at the end of a 39 kilometre event. I have made progress.
The Next day
After writing this blog post I decided to have a short nap. In normal circumstances I wake within half an hour or less. In this case I slept for over an hour. This morning I can still feel the effort in my legs. Zwift is a real workout.
Activity trackers are designed for walking, running, canoeing and activities where you move your arms. Cycling is not one of those sports. Unless you’re cycling on a specialist bike that has handles you’ll be using your legs and your upper body will move very little. I have a workaround.
My workaround is to put the activity tracker in a pocket. In so doing it counts how many times a leg “steps” and your goal for the day is not missed. This is especially true when your goal is to take several thousand steps. Some would call it cheating but I call it thinking laterally.
Yesterday when I did this it thought that I had been running so I corrected it to indoor cycling. Today despite 80-100 strokes per minute it counted my activity as walking.
Looking at the activity data gathered by Zwift we see that it was a 40.7km bike ride with an average speed of 32 kilometres per hour and 182 watts average power. If we look at the activity tracker stats it was a 7.26km walk at 9 minutes 22 per kilometre.
Efficiency
For a while I have wanted to compare and contrast the same number of steps when walking and cycling. We see that the different is about six fold. It’s five times more efficient to cycle than it is to walk. It took 7187 crank revolutions to travel 40.70. That’s about 5 meters per crank rotation. That’s 4 metres further than I travel per step when walking if we assume a one metre stride length.
40km, if walked would equate to about 40,000 steps. With fitbit I have earned that reward twice when hiking in the mountains. I traveled about 26-31km if I remember correctly.
Staying Relevant
Activity trackers could easily be seen as irrelevant if you go to the gym and train on an indoor bike, or if you use an indoor trainer at home. By putting a fitness tracker in your pocket and doing a workout you’re extending the step count. This means that you don’t need to feel frustrated that you worked out for an hour without something to show on fitbit, Garmin activity tracker or similar websites or services.
Conclusion
Activity trackers are great because their goal is to get us to be active throughout the day and aim for ten thousand steps. In practice we burn more energy by going for a bike ride so we miss out on the step count goal, especially after long rides that last a few hours. By putting activity trackers in our pocket we get the step count and we get a more energetic workout. If Garmin, Fitbit and other companies had a way of natively creating an equivalence we would spend less time finding workarounds.
The Seventh stage of the Tour De Zwift was Innsbruck, a course that some people can do in about 388 minutes. It takes me around 54 minutes. As I have not ridden this course frequently enough I decided to try to keep up with others and that meant a 20 minute best of 197 watts.
My lack of familiarity with the course meant that when the climbs came up I did not push as hard or as long as I would have if I did know the course. I went up faster than some but was easily overtaken by others. On the Alpe de Zwift during my PR I did not have this issue.
Cycling during the event
Towards the end of this course I got to the sprint and at this moment I saw that the best time was around 19 seconds so I decided to give everything I had to get the best sprint time on this stage. During other events I have come in positions ranging from 38th to 200th or slower. This time I was lucky.
According to Zwift’s algorithms I generated an average of 823 watts with a peak of 1112 watts for 20s averaging 54.7km an hour and peaking at 59.4km/h. By the end of this sprint I felt faint. This puts me in 816th place on this segment overall. The top ten sprinters did it in 14-16 seconds. I am 45th for this year. That’s easy to achieve at the start of the year.
I don’t train hard enough to generate from 4-6 watts per kilo for an hour or two at a time. I can’t keep up with A and B riders. I do however have the ability to sprint and this does provide me with an advantage. When I climb I always try to sprint for the last four hundred metres or more. This means that I put down a lot of power for a short period of time.
Zwiftpower strengths
According to Zwiftpower my strengh is uphill sprinting, where I can generate 17.61 watts per kilo. As a short sprinter I can generate 1057 watts. Both of these figures explain why I am theoretically good at sprints. I don’t use a power metre so these figures are hypothetical. As a rouleur or time trialist my ratings are 265-229 watts per kilo so this explains why I am easy to leave behind. Compare this to the 300-600 watts that we see Simon Richardson and others put out on Zwift live events.
And Finally
It’s easy to think of indoor cycling as sitting on a recumbent bike looking at a bar graph and straining to keep up in a gym for fourty minutes listening to a podcast or someone exercising in the corner of an apartment watching tv whilst simply counting down until the 15-20 minute session. Zwift is much more than that.
When you ride on Zwift you suspend disbelief and you feel as if you’re on a real bike ride with real goals. Some days are terrible and you want to stop and others are excellent and you exceed your goals. This is about having fun as you get fit.
I have ascended the Alpe de Zwift 5 times since i started using Zwift. My first climb took about one and a half hours, and then about one hour and sixteen minutes and finally just 57 minutes. I managed to get down to 57 minutes because I participated in Stage 6 of the Tour De Zwift event.
On previous rides I had ridden up the Alpe de Zwift alone. The first time I took it slow. My goal was simply to get to the top without worrying about how fast I did it. When that goal was achieved I went up once more alone and managed.
I participated in the Revo Climbers events twice and because we stopped several times to wait for people to catch up I was not going to get a personal best.
With the Tour de Zwift event things were different. This wasn’t a race but at the same time this wasn’t a group ride in which we had to stop and wait for people.
I rode slowly from the start of the TDZ event to the base of the Alpe De Zwift and then as we started to climb I started to pedal harder. I got one star, and then another, and then another. Eventually I started to feel tired and slowed down for half a segment before boosting again. I pedalled with a power of between 160-200 watts for most of the climb. I sometimes went up to 220 watts or more.
One of the great things about climbing up the Alpe de Zwift event is that you’re cycling with a group that is so spread out that you constantly have the opportunity to leapfrog from one group to a second, and then to a third and eventually you see that you’re at 800 metres and that you only have about three hundred metres to climb and you think “I can start to rest a little” but you don’t because you see that your time is faster than usual. You think to yourself “if I don’t push on to the end I will have wasted a lot of energy without getting a personal record so you push harder.
How hard did I push? Hard enough for a leap in FTP from 202 watts to 218 watts and I shaved 9 minutes off of my previous personal best. I got 22/22 stars for this climb and now I’m going to regret it because I will need to work on getting my ability to put out 230-240 watts for an hour. I have an interesting fitness challenge ahead of me.
If I continue at this rate then by this Spring or Summer when I have the opportunity to ride up the real thing (Alpe D’Huez) I will have a good time. My riding around Switzerland and its cols will also benefit.
What’s especially nice about this is that I didn’t really suffer. I didn’t doubt that I could make it to the top and my heart rate didn’t increase too much. I could have continued riding around Zwift but as my challenge was to get up during the event I was happy to let gravity drag me back down to the gate where everyone who has called it a day stops.
The 2019 Tour de Zwift event is a 9 event cycling event on Zwift. it takes you on nine different routes across five worlds with hundreds, and in some case more than 2000 participants at a time.
“…the Tour is a celebration of Zwift and the worlds within. You’ll experience the best of Zwift, together with thousands of people riding by your side. It’s not a race, but a giant party on wheels and a great way to experience Zwift.”
This event is different from others in that it spans several days. It also varies from other events in that the range is from 1-4 watts per kilo for A, B and C categories. Category A is the long distance course for women and men. B is the short distance for women and men. Category C is a Women’s only category.
Stage One
Stage 2
Stage Three
Stage Four
Stage Five
So far the experience of riding these events has been fun. I have also rode in other events in the gaps between TDZ events and I’m happy to have the occasional sprint or climb to do. I look forward to going up the Alpe De Zwift yet again. You’re not riding in the real world and you can’t really converse with people but it’s fun to have a group to keep up with, or a group in the distance to catch up with. I look forward to the last four stages.
 When people think of cycling in Spain they think of the seaside and they think of the coast. They think of long flat roads and short climbs. I made the mistake of thinking that so when I arrived in Spain I went cycling but every direction I tried involved climbing steep gradients. The first ride I did took me to the top of the Cumbre Del Sol and I felt that it was hard but I didn’t mind as I expected it to feel like a climb.
It’s when I tried to ride in other directions that I came up to the steep gradients and started to understand the challenge of riding in such a landscape. In Switzerland you can have 12km climbs but they’re at shallow gradients most of the way with the occasional steep gradient. Roads with steep gradients are usually closed in Switzerland. In Spain they don’t have such an issue with ice and snow so they can build steep hills. The hills are so steep that I considered using normal shoes so that I could dismount easily if I ran out of steam. I continued with clipped pedals.
I was using the Komoot app for one route and it asked me to go up consecutive steep gradients. I dismounted and walked up a short bit before getting to another flat bit of road. As I walked up that steep gradient I saw a scooter descending my way and as he applied the brakes to slow down a bit he hit a wet patch of road and the scooter slid for a distance downhill. I believe I made the right decision to dismount at this point.
I eventually reached my destination after studying the map on the app and ignoring directions.
Aside from the painful uphills there are some very nice downhills. This one is going down to the sea through Fanadix, not an Asterix character. This was an excellent and pleasant descent. I only went down this road twice and as I saw that there were some wet patches I didn’t go at full speed. It’s the type of descent you see idealised in road and cycling programs. I love when you have roads that are wide enough for traffic to go uphill and downhill because it feels safer than two-way roads that are only a car width wide.
When I cycle I try to take secondary roads as much as possible for two reasons. The first of these is that there is less traffic so you can enjoy the landscape and see places that people following main roads cannot see and the second reason is that when you’re going up a steep gradient it’s nice to be able to take up the entire road. This is something that I tried in Switzerland and adopt on most of my rides. It’s safer. Before this spot I was going up a steep gradient and sticking to the right of the road when I saw a car coming down the other way. The driver could have continued down safely but she was courteous and stopped, letting me progress up the hill.
This landscape reminds me of Mont Sur Rolle. Spanish terraced vineyards looking towards the sea. In Switzerland vines are given cables to grow on but in Spain at this time of year vines are cut so you see the vineyards unblemished by metal cables.
It’s nice to cycle in Spain but I noticed that I could easily do three to five hundred metres of climbing on every bike ride up steep gradients. You need strong legs for the gradients. In Switzerland it’s rare for me to stand up as I pedal but in Spain it’s almost a requirement. It is a good place to perfect your climbing technique. I will explore more routes next time I go.
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