Today the weather was rainy so I had a Zwift session. I decided to cycle the Yorkshire circuit. Cycling indoors is not as exciting as you don’t see as much. I listened to a hiking podcast but I didn’t pay much attention to the Zwift interface for at least the first fifteen minutes or so.
For the first time in 44 days or more I started the car’s engine and went for a drive. I heard the engine making a slightly different noise than usual so I let it warm up a bit and then I drove to the shops taking the long route. By long route I simply mean the walk that I’ve done dozens of times. It’s around 10 kilometres of driving in total. As it’s a diesel car it makes sense to drive far enough to get the engine warmed up and ready for when life returns to “normal”.
To switch off during sport, try to designate ten minutes of your run or ride to consciously focus on the world around you. What do I smell, hear, see and feel during exercise? Focusing on the here and now gives a feeling of security and makes conscious enjoyment possible.
With all of the pictures, descriptions of smells and even river walking I think I’ve definitely lived up to point 1. I have been running, cycling, walking, river walking and exploring variants on the routes I walk often. I can now walk without crossing people for ninety eight percent of my walks. People in cars don’t count.
I have spent a lot of time on TikTok which is both good and bad. It’s good because it cheers me up and now I’m familiar with another video sharing platform for when I’m applying for jobs but it’s bad because I could do more during the day.
Today during my walk this afternoon I surprised a cat on some stairs and I moved patiently. It brushed up against me so I started to stroke it. During this pandemic the only living things I have had physical contact with are cats. During a pandemic, if you’re not living with people, you are very limited.
Yesterday I did go out for a bike ride with a group of people, virtually. Before the ride I was feeling really down, and negative. After the ride I was feeling refreshed and relaxed. For the first time in three weeks I was able to do something physical without having to avoid people, worry about routing or anything else. All I had to do was pedal to the limit of my motivation and endurance.
If we went into full lock down then I would treat it as if we were in winter. I’d train hard, on the indoor trainer, so that when we are finally allowed more freedom in the outdoors I’d be fit enough to explore new routes.
The Shopping situation
When I went to the shops they were the emptiest I’ve seen them in a long time. I didn’t even need to queue to get in, although I did have a brief moment of over-exaggerating my steps as I was behind people walking slower than me. Everyone, or almost, walks slower than me, so that’s not a criticism of the people ahead of me. It’s good for you. You can use entirely different muscle groups as you behave in an eccentric manner. Even the self-checkout was empty, just one other person.
Of course in the process I forgot to buy plain rice so now I’m going to have to cook with wild rice today. I think playing the COVID-19 lottery, by going to the shops once a day, is risky enough. Wild rice is meant to be healthier anyway.
A Slow Down In New Cases
According to the figures I see, and articles in the press, it seems that the Pandemic has reached a plateau and we may be able to feel optimistic about the end coming in two or three weeks. Of course we have to be wary. With good weather more people are going out to enjoy the conditions, and the likelihood of another flareup is high if people are not careful.
Having said this I saw a tweet that the Canton De Vaud judiciary is going to start work again today, I saw that a shop selling coffee was open again and that a pet shop was open again too. These could be seen as signs, that more people are optimistic that things are improving.
Societal Change
I see that people are discussing whether society will have changed when this is all over and I believe that it will not have because of two key reasons. The first is that the wealthy, those with the power to effect change, will not have suffered like those that do not have the power to effect change. As a result many things will remain the same.
The second factor is rate of infection. When China was infected every other nation on earth had the opportunity to react, but as we see, after Italy was infected, no societies changed. Switzerland, France, Spain, The United Kingdom and the United States did not change.
It took governments saying “stay home, and self-isolate” for people to take action. To me this is a clear sign that the societal change people idealise is just that, an ideal.
Update: Victorian England was afraid of germs and diseases, which is why they wore white gloves and tried to keep their homes clean. The problem is that the paint they used to cover their walls was poisoning them, as was makeup and other elements of everyday life.
Side Effect
I have seen the headline in French and English that according to some people, the earth is less seismically active than usual. As none of the reputable news services have written about this story I am seeing it as just a curiousity, rather than something serious. It’s more likely that with less traffic, whether cars, trucks or planes, that seismometers, may detect less background noise.
In theory now would be the perfect time to have the LHC running, as there is less background noise.
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.
Yesterday I had a morning ride because I wanted to participate in the Tour de Zwift event. Yesterday the track was London and I was riding slowly for the first half, conserving energy. Eventually, when I got warmed up I started to ride harder and harder until I was overtaking quite a few other cyclists. I took advantage to play on the sprint and got the Green jersey. I took some time to recover and then I pushed myself. I was overtaking group after group. I gained at least 50 places in the standing.
When I got to Keith Hill I was pedalling hard. I was overtaking people constantly and I was pushing from one group to the next, catching up with them just to encourage myself to make that much more effort. Eventually, I got to the top of the hill and I saw that I had both the green jersey and the polka dotted one. “Meilleur Grimpeur” as you hear on French television during the Tour De France. It feels good to push that much, to exceed your previous rides and for it to be quantifiable. This ride resulted in quite a few personal records on Zwift. I also improved my FTP score.
Making such an effort on an ordinary day would be great. I’d have had a good workout and reached my daily exercise goal. In this case, it was a mistake. I went climbing without having a proper dinner in the evening and all the energy I had burned to cycle was now missing for climbing. This was my worst day of climbing in a while. I completed one or two routes rather than the usual five or six. Usually, before I go climbing in the evening I rest. When I get to the wall I’m impatient to climb and I do well.
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 summer I climbed over 8848 metres in a single month and now I have just completed the Zwift Everest challenge as well. This challenge, on Zwift, is much easier than in the real world because you are not carrying water, the weight of your bike, dealing with keeping yourself balanced on your bike or traffic.
Using a Fluid Trainer.
I don’t use a smart trainer. I use an Elite Qubo Fluid trainer and to climb I use information on speed to decide how hard to work. If I feel lazy I can pedal at 100 watts for a long period of time to get to the top but that isn’t in my nature. I like to push myself. I push until I get tired and then I recover, and then I push again. I also loe to sprint to the end and try to beat my previous time. Yesterday I rode up at a relatively lazy pace. When I got to within 1.5 kilometres of the top I really put out a lot of energy and when I reached the summit I was spent.
I put out an average power of 291 watts for an effort of 2 minutes 29 with a peak at 612 watts and a cadence of between 100 and 121 pedal strokes a minute. It might seem strange to put out such a lot of energy on a bike indoors but the feeling of accomplishment is the same as if you had done it in the real world.
I like climbing challenges because I live in a mountaineous landscape therefore reaching long ride distances is more challenging. It’s not that I don’t have the ability to ride for four or five hours but that if I ride four to five hours I travel one hundred kilometres because I have to climb cols if I want an interesting GPS track.
Stamina and technique
Stamina and technique do improve as you get used to climbing. You might be in the easiest gear going just above “stalling” speed but you endure up that hill until you get to the top. On Zwift you ride your bike in the physical world but a top of the range frame and wheels in the virtual realm. This means that you’re achieving times that you could never reach in the physical world with your current bike setup.
With a dumb trainer like mine, in contrast to a smart trainer with force feedback, you only see that you’re climbing because A) your speed decreases and B)The gradient indicator tells you that you’re on a hill. With a smart trainer it does get harder and you may want to switch to an easier gear Some people even add a gradient machine at the front to tilt the bike.
With what I describe above there are two things that you do not get with virtual climbing. The first of these is a sensation of altitude as the air gets thinner and colder and secondly you do not get that fantastic ride down. On an indoor trainer whether you’re going up or down you still need to keep pedalling. In the real world when you’re going downhill you rest and recover unless you’re one of the top descenders of the Tour De France or other cycling races.
Conclusion
I haven’t tried a smart trainer so my experiences and opinions on virtual climbing are based on theory rather than practice. I have used recumbent bikes but they give you a power to achieve rather than a sensation of climbing. Virtual climbing, as I have experienced it, is easier than climbing in the real world because if you go to slowly you don’t fall, and you don’t have the sudden very steep gradients that you sometimes experience in the physical world. Most indoor trainers are blocked at 12 percent if my memory serves me well. In the real world they can reach 23 percent or more.
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