Well that was an exceptionally interesting race for me, well at least i thought so.
After yesterdays longish MTB ride i thought “i can’t see how i’m performing so badly on Zwift, i feel strong and fast”
So i jumped on the 4:30PM WBR 4 lap race. However, to put things to bed in my head, i used the Isaac, set the pressure, set it with a Spindown test, then jumped on…. tiny warm up as i only jumped on with 2 mins to spare.
Off we went… Legs felt good, HR felt good, after the first 1/2 warm up lap we’d split C into 2 major groups, our group was the lead group and 12s ahead of group 2… we were 11 riders in C and 5-7 B’s i think, so quite a decent group.
In many ways, the next 3 laps were massively boring from a race report perspective, i kept my HR at about 161 average on the laps, but interesting up Horesguards hill i was 2nd/3rd quickest of the group, easily sticking in 4.3-4.5w/kg up it, with a couple of feathers, even more than that… But coming to the top in P2 usually. I was consciously letting other lead and sitting in for the majority of the laps. I lost ground by the hairpin somehow as my avatar lost momentum soft pedalling out of it and i was suddenly 2s down on my bunch, but a quick burst i caught them again and sat in. With 1/2 a lap to go, we’d dropped 1 guy, so we were a group of 9 now for the lead. One fell burst off the bunch with 3km to go, i let him go, which turned out to be a mistake as in the end he won C by about 9s ! Damn.. But i thought the pack would pull him back in…. In the last 1km i grabbed an Aero PU and went hard…. but only ended up dragging 3-4 other with me ! Damn again ! I battled but ended up 5th in the group.
After DQs etc and 1 B rider in our bunch, i ended up 2nd !
My power was 276w average… now that’s not quite my best ever…. but it’s certainly not far away and i was deliberately hiding for many parts… but it’s pretty much shown me that i’ve actually NOT lost form. BOOM !
Whether it’s the tyre or the bike, i’m guessing at the moment it’s more the bike… but a bit of both. However, it means many of my results lately have been a bit bogus and not a true representation of where my training is… Which is actually what i hoped and felt would be the case.
https://www.zwiftpower.com/race.php?id=13383
I’ll sleep better tonight.