Cycling

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.

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.

 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.

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. 

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. 

Recently I have been thinking about bike locks. I have been looking at the variety of options that there are and for a while I was worried about bike theft. It is for that reason that I never left my bikes unattended for more than half a minute to a minute during bike rides. 

This is easy when you’re going on 30-100km bike rides where you spend all of your time with the bike but what about when you replace your scooter with a bike. I never worried about leaving my scooter unattended and so far no one has stolen it. Logically I should have felt the same way about bikes and bike locks but I don’t. 

When I heard that Zwift would allow us to ride our bikes through a virtual New York I joked that I would use my singlespeed and I hoped that I could ride through the streets. Unfortunately you get to ride through the New York countryside, otherwise known as Central Park. Imagine riding through the Autumnal Hamptons at this time of year. 

I have ridden three or four times in virtual New York, once for pleasure and two or three times for training. As you saw from a previous post I really suffered on my second to last ride. I went rock climbing Saturday, to take a break from cycling and Sunday I returned and succeeded. 

The challenge is being gradual enough to react to the lag in power reading. A few training sessions ago I tried pedalling hard, overshooting the watts required but found that it was hard to catch the momentum just right. I then tried the opposite. I tried pedalling faster, to get to the desired wattage and then changing gear and keeping the wheel going at that momentum. This worked for a period. 

Komoot is an app based on socialising through sports. The sports are cycling, mountain biking, bike touring, hiking and running. It integrates well with Garmin and allows you to track activities from your mobile phone or import GPX, Fit and other files from other brands. It also allows you to create your own tracks ahead of an activity as well as plan it for a specific day and time. 

Sports

Running and hiking are two distinct categories with no differentiating between hiking, walking, nordic or rambling. Running does not have sub-categories for trail running, road running or other variants. Cycling seems to be the sport they are most focused on. They differentiate between road riding, mountain biking and touring.