Well this is surprising, got my first category win since getting the more accurate turbo in Crit City Dolphin of all places. Not particular in-keeping with my grinding up hill escapades.

Was based on points for fastest time each lap on the Prime (aka fairly short hill) plus some overall points for finishing position. Wasn’t a huge field either but a win is a win!

Now working out if it there’s other points based raced where punchy hill sprints are part of the set-up…

Lots of Crit racing in the past 4-5 days.

picking up 9.5, 17.5 and 17.5 ranking points to take me back to somehwere half respectable in the C ranking charts. C racing is still tough, but in a different way to B. In B it was all about hanging on for as long as i could. However in C i’m sitting there waiting… waiting, not exactly cruising but i’m only hitting 281-283 average for the race which is OK for me. But tactically it’s next to impossible for me to do anything different. I can’t break away late, or indeed early, there’s not enough power for that and i can’t win sprints as i don’t have one.
So i end up relying on some DQs and a bit of tactical positioning more than anything else. But, that said, it’s more fun that being mullered in B that’s for sure.

Not sure the legs have it in them today though..

Today was where the legs said “nah mate, no good”

It didn’t help that it was the Dolphin layout, so the hill is a bit tougher that way. Was in the melting pot until 800m and lost it… Damn.

https://www.zwiftpower.com/events.php?zid=972475

Anyone having issues with power tonight?  Took me 7 attempts of restarting zwift and my pc to get power to to work, despite hr, cadence and resistance working fine.

Then, when finally it did work, erg mode was automatically on/off every 20 seconds or so.

I thought maybe my Direto went bad but i connected my Wahoo Bolt which immediately connected the PM and showed power.

Ooh, that must have been the reason all my power dropped away at the end of the Quatch Quest ride, not that my legs fell off.

No takers for TTT this week? 6.30 this evening, 2 laps of Richmond Reverse.

Entry is in, start delay is 7.5 minutes. But so far, we have no riders.

If there’s a last minute surge…

Sign up here to category D. https://www.zwift.com/events/view/978171

I can’t ride today. Whatever happens I’ll try again next week.

No legs for me after 417Flyup yesterday sorry lads.

Got the Tron bike this morning, right at the top of the Alpe. It’s taken months to get there, but I worked out that since last friday morning when I did La Reine I have done 5000m of climbing in the last week. That’s alot for me so now it’s time to do some flatter stuff and work on speed.

The Team Time Trial entry is in for this week.

Thursday, 6.30pm, 1 lap (25km) of RGV on the French map. That’s the shortest and flattest for ages.

Enter category D here: https://www.zwift.com/events/view/991230

I think might start doing this in its own thread each week (like the MNPR threads).

@Savoyad -I’m away this week so won’t be able to join.

great, I’ve entered! Hopefully we have a few more takers this week. Haven’t actually Zwifted since the TTT 3 weeks ago now (I think!) due to the nice weather & other stuff so would be good to get back on it!

Not a terrible idea starting a new thread, might stop it getting lost amongst the general Zwift chat. Do they have an off-season or is it on literally every week?

new thread is a good plan.

Not sure about ‘flat’ on that one though lol.

All being well I should be back in this week. I’m signed up and will keep an eye out for the new thread.

Just me, dangeourbrain and zilog for the TTT so far. Any other interest?

25km of flat France, Thursday 6.30pm

Sign up here to Category D: https://www.zwift.com/events/view/991230

@zilog6128 said

Do they have an off-season or is it on literally every week?

As far as I know it’s literally every week. It is a bit relentless. Maybe we’re having our own mini off-season at the moment…

@weeksy said

Not sure about ‘flat’ on that one though lol.

Nice ride this morning weeksy. Isn’t the only hill on that RGV course literally a bridge… so small it’s dwarfed by the bigger bridge next to it?

I’ve posted a dedicated TTT thread. It did occur to me that our habitual 6.30 timeslot was chosen at the height of lockdown and if we keep doing this there will maybe come a time when more normality for us all means that becomes less convenient. Just something to keep in mind, even if not until after summer.

I’ll join the TTT tomorrow mate, will sign up later.

This mornings ride was nice. Suited me lots.
https://www.zwiftpower.com/events.php?zid=989403

I managed a decent start and the first 13.4km i sat with the As and Bs, but on about 13.5 some guy in A kicked off the front and people went with him… I had a choice, go or stay, i decided to stay as the groups split and sat with 5 others, including 2 Cs, who were later DQ’d. So in the end it turned out to be a pretty easy and convincing C win. As with all the combined start races, if you miss the shake up at the start, you’re finished… Get in the right group, conserve energy and you’ve got yourself a win.

Trying to make sense of this questionaire Zwift sent out to some users… Looks ominous (read expensive)!

https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2020/08/zwift-considering-45-month-features-latest.html

There are some good updates to Zwift today that could be relevant to us on here. Quite a few changes but most importantly:

– France and Paris available as a meet up world (Tuesday night sprint circuit or Mont Ventoux commute?)
– Late join to meetups (helps those of us on commutes who oversleep!)
– Race results available on meetups (STW racing league?)

– Race results available on meetups (STW racing league?)

Even though i’m not going to win that… it has potential to be fantastic !

An STW series taking in different worlds, different styles of racing etc…. Yeah, i’d be all over it.

An STW series taking in different worlds, different styles of racing etc…. Yeah, i’d be all over it.

I’d b be happy to help try getting that off the ground.

We have a bit of time to get something sorted – something starting in September should be ideal as the nights are starting to draw in and people will be back on Zwift more

and people will be back on Zwift more

Especially if they close the pubs so the kids can go to school.

Anyone breaking out their wattmonster for the 9:45am today.. ?

Crit race with plenty of well ranked riders in, so if i can get lucky i may pick up a ranking point or 2….

I’m currently sitting 433.19 points which is good for 333rd in C… i’d like to find 10 points which would move me up to 250th…. but it’s completely possible i’ll get 0 lol.

I was thinking a mini-series to start with?

Say one weekday evening (Tuesday or Thursday) at about 8pm (to give people time to get home from work, sort out kids etc).

Would go on for 6 weeks from second week of September so would be finished before half term, therefore the majority of people should be about.

Everyone sets of together and races to the line in whichever way they choose. We would then sort out winners of individual categories (A, B, C, D, E). E can be a womens specific category but as the other cats are sorted in W/kg they are welcome to join in for whichever category they want (just Zwift seems to single out a womens competition in most events).

It would be a choice between points scoring for the individual categories (10 points for 1st, 8 for 2nd etc) or do it just on time with the time from the 6 races added together for an overall winner of the series. Time would mean you would likely get a mix of cats through the overall standing as the categories don’t always play to peoples strengths on some course.

Courses would be a mixture so likely one hilly one, a couple of crits, maybe an ITT and a couple of more flowing rolling races scattered throughout the Zwift world.

Any thoughts?
We can then tweak the format for the pre-xmas version depending on the success of this one.

Hey. Hands off Thursday evenings robbo!

Apart from that it’s a good idea. Is it too soon to tell how much functionality is being made available to avoid doing all that scoring manually?

Good point will make it Tuesday to leave Thursday for STW Team Time Trail then.

Hopefully doing a couple of early morning commute/group rides next week so will let you know what functionality we have then!

Hopefully doing a couple of early morning commute/group rides next week so will let you know what functionality we have then!

If a proper 20min ish crit is available as an option I could do a 6.45 start Monday or Wednesday and still be done in time to get to the office…

FWIW I think manual might be the way to go anyhow as we could reasonably handicap it to keep everyone competitive. Eg I’m a B but in a crit I’m sitting firmly in A outputs (but it doesn’t count since its a sub 20min ride so no ftp…). Entering as an A the field amongst us lot would be relatively small and as a B I’ll be racing folks who only just scrape 3.1w/kg.

A short series would be good if only to get a good base for each of us so we can make it a bit fairer next time.

If I know peoples FTP and weight I can work out a handicap for each course before hand. It wouldn’t be that much work to do to add a handicap. I would use software to calculate the time for the course assuming all other factors remain the same it will give a time difference for each person to complete it. This can be taken of the time to give an overall leaderboard and we don’t worry about cats.

I will see if I can get a crit circuit for a Wednesday commute Brian.

Arrrrrgh. That was not my best ever race. Bit of pre-race banter in the pen. On the Fri morning Crit race we often see either 1 or 2 U13 racers who seem to be CX racers outside and are awesome inside in C lol.

ME and a couple of others tried various tactics to break the youngsters but failed…. I died on my ar*e with about 1.3km to go….

https://www.zwiftpower.com/events.php?zid=992548

Just gone to http://www.zwift.com to update my weight from 80.0Kg yesterday to 79.3Kg today (dehydration is most likely cause) and you can no longer do decimal settings, not an issue in the past, struggling to recall when I actually used the turbo (early July maybe?).

So I’ll be weight doping at 79Kg, if I’m mad enough to finally try the new French routes in this heat, while trying not to sweat into my healing open wound. 😆

Just seen this review of the new Elite smart steering gadget for Zwift on DCR
https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2020/08/zwift-steering-elite-sterzo-smart.html?fbclid=IwAR1_GV12ZQOMzuEagZp_sWfH39lsHhjPk26kXwxDG8w1uCqH17ZvRDGRkok
He was very positive about it! (Doesn’t work the same as MTB steering… in fact you cannot currently use it for that apparently!)
Price is only £75 which seems pretty affordable, the not smart version alone is £35 (haven’t got that but have something similar from Kurt, really like being able to noodle the front wheel about whilst on the turbo!)
Reckon I’ll be getting one! 😀

So I’ll be weight doping at 79Kg, if I’m mad enough to finally try the new French routes in this heat, while trying not to sweat into my healing open wound.

Pretty sure it’s been no decimals on weight for as long as I’ve been on 9ish month? Can switch to imperial and then it does a conversion.

I think technically you’re sposed to round up or down so 79.3 would be be 79 but 79.5 would be 80

Only 7 people turned up for the C cat 17.30 sprint race but a win is a win so I’ll take it 😂👑
Hopefully be a bit cooler for the TTT on thurs tho!

Well done zilog, I’ve never won a race 🙁

ta! definitely gave it 100% as I had to make a deposit into my special ZwiftBucket immediately after crossing the finish line 😂

I assume thats the soggy towel tub, not that you actually managed to make your self sick.

If it was the latter, I hope it was a previously flattened paper cup.

That was awful. 7 days off tarmac day 2, not a race, but it really is a race, and I got stuffed.

Straight from the mtb and my commute onto the turbo in my commute kit.

I picked up a good group early on and held with them until you pass under the building about 1k from the first climb. Massively over heating so had to ditch my baggies at that point, turns out you can’t keep pedaling whilst you take shorts off.

They had 45 seconds on me by the time I got moving again. With no group to hold and my hr through the roof I backed off and planned to catch the next group coming through.

Three groups blew through me in the climb, I just kept dropping gears and watts. I was into double figure wattage by the end of lap one and only going down.

I nearly jacked it in at the sprint on lap 2, I’d stabilised a bit but I was spending so much effort on keeping cool I was struggling to hold 150w and I’d lost as much motivation as power and drunk the full litre of water I had.

Got picked up by a group I could hold at about 200 which was the encouragement I needed to stay in and fortunately Mrs brain came home and replenished my water supplies and returned the fan just before the climb on lap two,without I don’t think I’d have made it.

Not sure if it was the 50mi I already had in my legs today or the 38 degree heat in the man cave with no fan but that was possibly the most horrible zwift session I’ve ever done.

95th of 172 on the line

Oh man! Kudos for sticking with it and finishing. Sometimes it can be hell on the bike but it makes us stronger.

I hope my stage 2 at 6am isn’t as painful.

Did better than me. I had internet drop out at the start and by the time I was back online I was virtually last. Repeated sprints to get up groups saw me in a reasonable group by just after the 1st sprint banner and I managed to get over the 1st climb with the front of the group, 2nd climb was ok but by the last one I was really struggling. Groups had been blown apart, no-one around me and sweating like a similie and a dodgy connection still I decided to call it a day after a lap.

Moral of today’s story I can’t do repeated 450W sprints through broken packs and then ride up hills.

Moral of today’s story I can’t do repeated 450W sprints through broken packs and then ride up hills.

Ah yeah, it sucks to learn that but it’s a good lesson! Odd how often I need to relearn it though.

I hope my stage 2 at 6am isn’t as painful.

How did you get on?