Cycling week 15 in review

On Monday, still tired from the big ride last Saturday (>10,000ft of climbing) went out for a quick spin after work. With John we did a short loop and stopped at the CSA as John heard their energy bars were good. The farm dog Amos was manning the disinfection station. We alsor ran into David who runs the CSA. He was getting ready for his Monday ride.

On  Tuesday was the 2nd do-it-yourself race of the NCC Time trial / Hill Climb series. After the 9 mile flat time trial last week, this week it was a hillclimb that started in Northampton. The climb went along Chesterfield road. The race segment was 6.6 miles with an average grade of 3.3%.

I had made a route of in total 40 miles to ride to the start, do the race and ride back home after the race. Nice big day of riding after work. While riding to the start definitely felt that I did not have super legs. Also was not focussed as I missed the entrance to the bike path and when I finally entered the path, I should have left it and ended up stuck in Look park and had to backtrack to get out.

When I finally ended up at the start it took my neck scarf off (last race it got too hot) and then went for it. On this course it was very hard to get a rythm. The road kept turning up and down, there was even a 1/2 mile descend. While going up I saw a number of NCC riders, who completed the race, descending on the opposite side of the road. Hard to recognize with helmets, sun glasses and my heart rate through the roof.

In the end I finished in 28mins and 32secs with an average of 14.09mph. The end result was an 8th place. This put me in 4th place overall after 2 races. I then still had to ride 18 miles back home. Fortunately made it back while there was still some light. Also hit some gravel which my 32 mm tires were not happy with.

On Thursday the weather turned sour. Cold, rainy and snow in the forecast. I decided to do an indoor training workout followed by a social NCC Zwift ride. For the training workout I used the last workout from our winter program. A hard workout with 18 min standing with 15 accelerations, 9 VO2 30s efforts and a racing winning effort of 5mins.

As entertainment I used both the Alpe du Zwift climb and video footage from a Tuscany trip in 2019.

When I train using Zwift lately, I have been going up Alp du Zwift, for various reasons. First to complete the climb challenge and get the Tron bike (I am now just over 50% of the 50,000 meters of climbing). And 2nd when finishing the climb there is a wheel of fortune where you ca win a set of light-weight climbing wheels. Again no luck this time.

Turned out I had a lot of footage recorded on the Tuscany trip. I am going to try to bring it down to less than 20 minutes. It will be tough as there as so many beautiful moment and vistas captured.

Was pretty pooped after the workout. The 5 minute race effort with 4.5 min at FTP, then 20 secs at V02Max and finishing it all off with a 10s all out sprint. That on top of the other efforts. After the workout was not on the top Alpe du Zwift yet. It needed another 10 mins to see the wheel of fortune, which gave me a ..... helmet, just one slot passed the light-weight wheels. Bummer.

I then had 1 minute to change the Zwift course to join Michael and others in the NCC social ride for an hour. We rode on the London Classique course while chatting about greencards, Tuesday's hill climb and other topics over Discourse.

On Friday King winter returned (hopefully temporarily) from his summer hibernation with a snow storm. Therefor no ride on Friday nor on Saturday morning, but weather and roads got better on Saturday afternoon. I did a quick loop to Greenfield and climbed back on South Shelburne road, first time up this road.

On Sunday I went out for a ride with John and Pamela. They were on their tandem and we headed towards Leverett. The route was over 60 miles, unfortunately I had to cut it short as had some errands to do before and after.

Highlight of the ride was the climb up Rattlesnake gutter road, a gravel climb towards the Leverett coop. Finished the ride with 50 miles and 162 TSS. Overall completed this week with a TSS of 590, 30 short of this week's goal. Still mesmerized how I made that mistake. Anyway with last week's surplus of 103 call it even :-).

Here this week's rides on Veloviewer.