Today could be described as a Floating Border bike ride. During the bike ride I saw at least three or four patrols. One of these patrols had stopped a biker and were checking his papers, a second patrol was checking that the barriers were still in place. In a third case it was the Police Municipale driving towards me near Vevey.
It’s the fiftieth day of solitary confinement for me and I have moments when I feel fine and normal, and others where I don’t. I would love to say that I found an excellent way to celebrate the fiftieth day of self-isolation but I didn’t.
Fifty days in self-isolation would have been very different if the weather had been bad. If the weather had been bad I would have spent more time gaming and doing other passive things like watching television series or reading books. In theory life will be back to the new normal in a week.
I suppose that going on the bike ride that took me furthest from home in fifty days should count for something. The weather is nice enough to be in cycling clothes.
When I was scrolling through Tik Tok videos I found one video that was ideally suited for a duet. It’s a pan showing the Swiss countryside with some music. I could attempt a dance duet but this is much easier. This is the landscape I cycle in.
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.
Today I participated in two Zwift events, a social ride and a race. The social ride was one hour of pedalling at a comfortable pace trying to keep to the same speed as the group. Rather than trying to be as fast as the group I was trying to pace myself to be within the peloton rather than riding off.
Social rides are amusing because you start on the peer and wait for the counter to get down to zero and when it does you go from being on a home trainer in the real world cycling on a home trainer in the virtual world to cycling on the roads of Watopia. Social rides are interesting because you have people from Australia, England, Denmark and many other countries, so long as they are in a timezone where it would be reasonable to cycle at such a time of day.
It’s the first time that I get out of bed, look at the schedule for Zwift events and feel excited about doing something virtual like riding a bike. Keep in mind that today I could have burned diesel by heading to St Triphon to climb with people I know. I felt no motivation to drive that far so I was happy to stay home.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that riding a bike on Zwift is riding an apartment bike because it isn’t. It’s similar to riding a bike in the real world, with real hills, virtual drafting, virtual fellow drivers, no cars and more. What is real is the conviviality, the desire to share a few phrases, the cheering and the desire to ride as a group.
During the ride we did sprint twice and on the first sprint I beat my personal record and on the second go I had less energy remaining. During the first sprint I put out up to 934 watts in theory. That’s enough energy for me to rest on the handle bars for a little bit before catching my breath and continuing.
When I ride in the real world it’s usually alone and I race against myself but when it’s on Zwift I have a choice between virtual social rides, virtual races, training, or just a “as the wind takes me” option. Of course there is no wind, I mean that you ride for the pleasure of riding.
A Race up a Volcano
The second ride of the morning, about 15 minutes after the first ride finished was a 15km race up the side of the volcano on the Watopia map. I thought that with my abilities I should select group D. I pedalled during the countdown to keep warm and a few seconds before the race started I pedalled at a higher cadence to compensate for the lag that I experience with my current setup. I started well but I tired more quickly than most. While I was trying to maintain 200 or more watts they were racing off into the distance. I found myself in 110th or lower positions but I continued pedalling. I tried to maintain between 180 watts and 220 watts. I kept looking at the riders beside me and most were category C riders.
Keeping up
I worked hard to keep the power up and at moments when I felt that I needed to rest I changed gear, changed my cadence, but tried to keep the cadence up. Usually my cadence is about 85 when I’m riding alone but in this race, as I tried to keep up it reached an average of 105 strokes per minute. Over the duration of the race I was generating about 2.61 watts per kilo.
I didn’t know what to expect from the other racers so my goal was simply not to be dropped into last position. After that and as I got closer to the end my goal was to be within the top one hundred so although my body wanted me to slow down I kept working at it. I was pushing at over 200 watts for 14:45 in this race.
I spent hours and days training on Zwift before I felt ready to try a race. I trained for multiple sessions and those sessions got me used to pushing beyond my comfort levels for minutes at a time and it paid off in this race. If I continue training I can aim for better positioning. Today I was in 6th place in D category out of over 40 riders and 99th out of 180+ riders. So half of the racers have trained more than me. I can continue training and see where I come up next time.
What I like about the race, that I don’t have except for sprints is information on how far it is to the end of the race. If I know for how many more kilometres I have to make an effort then psychologically I can push harder. This was just a short race at 15km and I would struggle on a longer race and I would struggle on the flat.
I want to participate in more races and I need to choose which training course to attempt next. It’s nice to race virtual cyclists rather than real cars, e-bikes or people on lighter bikes than the one I ride in the physical world. In the virtual world today I was riding a trek emonda. This might be geeky but it’s pushing me to be fitter so fewer people can object.
This weekend teams of Resistance Ingress agents from Fribourg, Lausanne and Geneva met in Fribourg to neutralise and capture all Enlightened portals. Some teams were on foot to liberate portals from the centre of the city. I was with the bike team and we took care of liberating all of the portals on the outskirts. It involved cycling up and down hills, a thunderstorm and being rained on.
I really enjoyed being part of the cycling team. It’s a fantastic way to get around and it’s a good way of seeing a big portion of unfamiliar cities with a minimum of effort. My team members were on electric bikes and I was on a mountain bike. This was great for me. I had to work hard to keep up with them. This was a good workout. There were moments where I generated up to an estimated 1300 watts of power for very short bursts and got the fifth best time on a segment.
I enjoyed this experience so much that I would love to do this again in other cities around here. Cycling gave me a workout and playing Ingress gave me time to recover. It seems that if you’re creating fields having a bike is ideal. You can get almost anywhere from anywhere within a city within minutes with a minimum of effort. By car this would be dangerous and impractical and on foot it would be slow and impractical.
Today I saw that they were expecting a storm and I was really looking forward to a sudden downpour, lightning and more. I also thought that it would trap me at home and that I’d have a day without walking or cycling. In the end I saw that the doppler radar no longer expected any rain etc so I got ready for a bike ride and went out. I could see that the clouds over the Jura were nice and dark, threatening to become an active storm. I still continued my bike ride. I went from near Nyon to Mies, up from there towards Commugny, then towards the Versoix, up a road and had not explored yet.
During the ride I saw a few fresh roses, so I stopped to photograph and smell the roses. I didn’t see as many people walking and cycling as I would usually expect. They were wisely hiding from the rain as I should have done. I had a cycling rain coat, so if the rain had caught me I could have been slightly less drenched, and cycling clothes are not usually dry at the end of a ride anyway.
What is less fun is hail and thunder. Both of those things are dangerous. Small hailstones hurt when they hit you. I know from personal experience. Not only is hail painful, but it’s cold and it can chill you to hypothermic levels within minutes.
It didn’t hail, but it did rain and thunder, and it missed me by five minutes or less. If I had been that bit slower, my bike and I would have been soaked. As things were, the rain didn’t get me.
My fingers went numb with cold during today’s bike ride. I saw that there was a chance of rain but I went anyway. I went for a simple reason. Some people in an apartment next door were banging on walls, and the noise is unpleasant. The noise is so unpleasant that the idea of cycling in the cold rain was more appealing than listening to that noise.
When I started the ride I wore my rain clothes. I also wore gloves. I wish I had at least one extra glove layer to protect me further. I think the mixture of rain and cold got through the gloves to my fingers. For the entire ride I questioned whether to turn back and give up on the day’s ride. I didn’t. I toughed it out.
I rode up towards Gingins along the farm roads, before going across towards La Rippe. I didn’t go to La Rippe because of the downhill from La Rippe to Crassier. On a rainy day and with the brakes I have I prefer not to run that risk. The brakes were less responsive than usual. From Crassier I went across the Voie Verte to Divonne, and from Divonne down towards Mies, and from there back towards Nyon.
You know how Cousteau always wore his trademark red hat. I feel the need to do the same, but with another hat. I got chilled during my bike ride and now I need to eat a good lunch, and let my body warm up again. This ride has chilled my core.
Yesterday it was raining too, so I tested to see whether my devices worked with Zwift. They do. I rode for about 20-30 minutes before stopping and deciding to go for a proper walk, despite the risk of rain. The desire to go outdoors is strong. Even on rainy days I want to go outdoors. For once I rode in the rain.
So far this year I have been cycling for 680 km in 33hrs with a height gain of 6800 meters. In this time I have used my narrative clip 2 device to document the ride with a picture every 10-30 seconds as I want to focus on riding rather than other things. I like to have as high a moving time as possible so I usually stop once I get back to my starting point.
By cycling I see the landscape at a slower, more interesting speed. I see the roads, I smell the vegetation, I feel the heat and I feel the cold. I also discover small paths that I would not take in a car or on a scooter. In practicing this sport I get to know the landscape. I also get to see seasonal changes.
This year I have cycled in the rain, in the snow, in the wind and on days like today. Today it was sunny and there was no wind to fight against. It made the ride more pleasant.
The technology I took on today’s ride was my narrative clip 2 to take pictures of the bike ride, my Crosscall Odyssey+ phone, the Cateye Evo+ and finally the Suunto Ambit 3. I also took the Ricoh Theta S but never stopped to take pictures. For future rides I should fix it to the handle bars. I could bring you with me on my next bike ride. Of course I would keep just the interesting bits of the ride. I can throw away the rest.
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