Tour de Zwift 2019 complete
| |

Tour de Zwift 2019 complete

Byrichard

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 Zwift events 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.

How to use an Activity Tracker when Cycling
|

How to use an Activity Tracker when Cycling

Byrichard

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.

Alpe De Zwift in 57 Minutes And 10 Seconds.
|

Alpe De Zwift in 57 Minutes And 10 Seconds.

Byrichard

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.

Tour de Zwift – Over Half Way Through

Byrichard

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.


Zwift Tour description


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oq5fIaKpvXw&feature=youtu.be


“…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.