Cycling week 7 in review (mmxxii)
Monday definitely needed to recover from the long Fat bike ride from the day before. But there was more fat biking. Tuesday morning I decided to checkout the trail to Chapel Falls. The trail starts at the Bullitt reservation. Since it is a hiking trail worried whether it would be ridable and not to bumpy but that turned out not to be the case. After an initial fairly steep ascent the trail evens out a little and the trails splits in the short pebble trail and the Two bridges trail, which leads to the waterfall.
I had brought the GoPro to test it out. The last 2 Fat bike rides I had not been successful. One ride I had forgotten to include the sd card and the last Sunday the batteries seems to have not been charged. This time the batteries behaved despite the cold and I was able to record some sections of the trail.
After just under 30 minutes I arrived at the falls. They were covered with ice and looked beautiful. It resembled a Gothic cathedral. In front of the the ice clad rocks, a small patch of open water had some lily leaf ice patches floating around.
After admiring the most impressive lower level of the falls, I parked my bike against a tree. I then carefully hiked up the icy trail to the higher levels of the fall and took some photos and videos.
When I was satisfied with the footage, hiked down to the bike and retraced the trail back to the junction with Pebble trail. Turned out I missed the junction and already was on the Pebble trail, as the large rock embedded in a bunch of tree, resembling a pebble already showed up.
From the pebble I continued the trail to the open field and took in the big vista. Since at this point the Go-Pro batteries had died. I tried to take some video footage holding my phone while descending on the field, but that did not work out too well, managing speed, bumps and holding the camera straight. The whole trip including driving from and to the house only took 2 hours.
In the evening I participated in the NCC Hill climb race at 6pm. The race was on the 1.2 Leith hill KOM section in the Zwift London world. There was a little mishap as the choosen group route (Greater Flat loop) did not include the climb. We had to start a new group ride on the Greatest London Loop. Just when everyone had gathered in the new start point and were about the ride together to the start of the climb. I got a call from Neil and therefor missed the group start. I had to race the climb up by myself. Since it was a short climb my PR was 7:41 I was planning to do about 320 watts.
For the first time I thought to include some standing into the indoor hill climb. So after about a minute I stood up and to my surprise was able to push 340 / 350 standing and did not seem tire out quick. So I decided to stand the whole climb. By the time I was done I did get seated for 2 short periods on the less steeper parts to get my heartrate down a little and finished in 6:24. My average power was 336 watts. So felt really good out my effort and time. My heartrate was through the roof though. Turned out the other racers had done great as well, as almost everyone had PRs and I finished 13th out 18. Pff strong riders at NCC.
Wednesday I went skiing with Dusty and met Aimee, and later Melissa at the ski slopes. Despite the main lift being down it was a good day of skiing. I skied 21 miles and 16 runs.
Thursday was the NCC Zwift road and this time we did 2 laps on the Champs-Elysees. I had woken up that day with terrible muscle ache in both my upper calves. The warmup was therefor painful and I was thinking of not racing, then I decided to at least one lap. But while racing decided to finish it up. The race pace was relatively easy in the beginning which helped. I had gathered a aero helmet power up and applied that just after the last corner for the straight to the finish. That helped and I was able to come in 8th and 3rd of all the NCC racers, directly followed by 6 other NCC racers.
Since we would flying to LA on Sunday, decided to do a harder effort on Friday. Also despite the still sore calf muscles. I went up Alpe du Zwift at Sweetspot pace, which is basically 95% of my FTP. Which meant I needed to keep my wattage 266 watts. Sweetspot efforts are known to be an time efficient way to train muscle edurance instead of a longer endurance ride. When I was done, I had climbed up Alpe du Zwift in 55:05 my 2nd best time with an average of 265watts. My heartrate had slowly creeped up from 132 to 158.
Saturday was bit of a weird day weather wise, with sun, snow flurries and even blizzard conditions. Since I was tired from the week decided to just do an ez spin and hopefully spin out that uppercalf muscle ache.
I had seen the day before that I was close to finishing up my Zwift Mt Everest challenge. I was at 99% and only needed about 500 ft to finish the required 164,042 ft (50km).
As a reward for completing the challenge you receive the Concept Z1 ("Tron") bike, one of the fastest bikes in Zwift. And indeed midway the ez spin, a screen popped up informing me that I had completed the challenge. Off course I stopped and went into the garage and enabled the neon glowing Tron bike. Apparently it is not a good climbing bike. Good to know.
Only did 1 outdoor bike ride here on VeloViewer.