The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men. Gang aft agley,. An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,. For promis’d joy! Still, thou art blest.
Robert Burns
I don’t know the proper past tense of “gang aft agley”, but hoss I tell you one dang thing…my schemes ganged afted agleyed in this race.
The idea was to hit the Leg Snapper like a maniac on every lap and use my…uh…”corpulence” to carry the attack on the downhill and pressure people to keep up for the sprint. Then lay back in the cut/draft for the rest of the lap.
Almost at the top of the Legsnapper on the first lap, I knew I was in trouble. I lost touch with the front 4 or 5 riders just as we crested the hill, and I was toast. Even before this race when I was warming up it felt like my heart rate was much higher than was being registered on the screen.
I know what was going on here–I still haven’t recovered from Saturday’s massive workout. It really took the mustard out of me. I rested on Sunday and did a pretty easy ride yesterday hoping it would get the jelly out of my legs.
No dice.
I did find a solid group for the 2nd lap, which included my weekly frienemy, Hal Wye. I can’t overly express my appreciation to Hal for screencasting and posting these videos to YouTube so that I can watch them later and share. He was pretty upset with me last week for getting caught in my sticky draft, and he exacted his revenge this week when he Burrito’d me. It’s all queue’d up below–you can see the exact moment when he rang my Taco Bell.
This group helped me get through lap 2 at a decent speed, but I knew the whole time I was just hanging on by the skin of my teeth. I expected to get dropped, I just didn’t know when it would happen. So I finished this race up at a pretty easy pace after getting dropped from this group. I have my first TTT with DIRT (my new team) on Thursday, and I don’t want to embarrass myself there.
Still, thou art blest…
Good lesson learned here. The ZRL season 4 opener is a TTT two days after the 6 Gap ride. I can say without a doubt that I’ll be on the bench for that one, unless my team is hankering for a loss.
What do you do when you want to get over? What do you do when you want to get through? What do you do when you just can’t take it? What do you do when you just can’t fake it anymore?
Deal with it. That’s what you do.
Henry Rollins
How many ways can my competitors break and demoralize me? We’ll find out, because I plan to keep coming back until I make it through in one piece. This, however, was not the week for that.
I was really looking forward to this race, especially after having missed the Everything Bagel race the previous week. Although I’ve done thiscoursequite a few times, I’ve never done it in this direction and never for this many laps. Even without Sherpa Dave’s excellent recon series. The keys to this course are the cobbled climb and the rollers at the end of each lap–both are good spots to attack.
Or, in my case, to be attacked.
Unfortunately, I can’t find a video of this category and time zone on Youtube. Come on people! Get with it! I’m relying on you to provide content for me! But I’m embedding an exciting race from my cat in another time zone provided by JLC so that my readers (me) have a reference. I really like how JLC’s video has a cam attached, so you can see the IRL suffering.
I usually like to include a link to my Strava analysis of my ride and include screenshots and such, but I can’t do that for this race because the ride details were corrupted by a bug in the Apple TV app which prevented the data being uploaded. Luckily, the data still made it into ZwiftPower, so my results stand.
This was only my 3rd ride using Apple TV after a PC crash. I have to say that the 4k graphics are amazing with Zwift, and the operation is super simple–except for that pesky remote…that is not good! Overall, I think the Apple TV device is the way to go with Zwift, and I wish I’d just started out with that. All the crashes and video card upgrades and stuff I did just weren’t cost effective.
And Zwift sent out a patch to fix the problem that affected me on this day. I just didn’t get it in time.
I really don’t understand why Zwift isn’t selling their own device that is marketed just for their software. I think they could sell a ton of these at the $100 price point, especially to new users. They could even sell a bundle with device/trainer/HRM all together and make a killing.
Anyway, back to the race.
This does give me a chance to document my lack of understanding of how the points are awarded for these races. My reading comprehension is generally pretty decent (at least that’s what I understand from what I’ve read–haha), and I’m pretty good at math, so I’m having trouble understanding how the results I’m seeing for the FTS and FAL results on ZwiftPower translate to only 2 FAL points for this race. The scoring system seems pretty clear, and the FAL results on ZwiftPower are too, so I’m not sure what I’m missing.
Just looking at the FAL points for the hot laps, I’m seeing 16 points for me. But I only received 2 points. I guess as long as the scoring is happening consistently, and I’m sure it is, there’s no problem. And it’s not like we’re playing for money. I’m more interested in this because I like the gamification.
My gut feeling was that I’d be able to stick with the race leaders for most of the race, but would eventually get dropped and finish in the top 3rd or so. Knowing this, my strategy was to try to get as many FAL points as I could while I was in the mix, get with the chase group as soon as possible once I was dropped, and then fight for the highest placement I could get. I executed this plan pretty well (I thought), although I did lose some steam once I joined the chase group and finished at the back of it. It was pretty disappointing that I wasn’t able to compete more in that group. But, when I looked at the results from other time zones, I realized that we were going at a pretty screaming pace compared to them.
My original guess based on the other time zones was that I’d finish in around 36:00, but I ended up finishing in 34:03. It was one of those efforts that had me lying in the floor in a pool of sweat when it was over, just trying to recover and get my heart rate down. There is no spot in this course where you can relax and recover, and 12 laps of that is brutal, even if the time to complete isn’t that long.
I stayed with the main group until the climb of the 10th lap, where I expected a little bit of a reprieve once we crested. Unfortunately for me, that’s when there was an unexpected attack. I was positioned at the back of the group and just didn’t see it coming. Once I was detached they were gone. Lesson learned here–I was trying to stay in the middle of the pack most of the race to prevent this exact situation, but I got caught napping, and ended up 24th out of 56 starters.
Next time.
I’m really loving these races and the format. I’m a little worried about this race upcoming in Richmond though. The climbs happen early and then it ends mostly flat. I’m not a strong climber, so it’s going to be tough on me to stay in the lead group to the flats. If this course was reversed it would suit me much better.
