There’s a new thread over at Zwift.community asking about people’s current training setups, so I thought I’d go back through my photostream and find some of my recent setups. My paincave has been through more iterations than I care to think about, and luckily I didn’t photograph them all, or I’d be here all day. Read on for pics and ramblings
Category Archives: Training
On Being Stateless in Zwift
So I joined Zwift just recently. Sure, I’m a little late to the party, but reasons.
Anyway, while signing up, Zwift allows you to select your nationality, and offers a veritable cornucopia of nations with which you can identify. For instance, you can show the world you’re from The Faroe Islands, Kiribati or the British Virgin Islands. If you’re a pedalling priest, you can select the flag of the Holy See. Wow. So many flags.
So I went looking for my flags.
Now, I carry two flags on my bikes.
For the uninitiated, the flag on the left is the bleeding eyes of Sufferlandria. Black for Suffering, White for Purity of Suffering and Red for Suffering.
I didn’t really expect the Sufferlandrian flag to be available in Zwift. It would have been a nice little easter egg bonus, but I didn’t expect it. Nevertheless I did feel a mild stab of disappointment when I couldn’t find it.
So obviously I went off hunting for my other flag – the actual flag of the actual country in which I was actually born. Wales. A Red Dragon on a field of white and green.
This flag
You know what? It’s not there.
A country of 20,779 km2 and over three million people. Just not there. A country that has its own damn wikipedia. A country with its own legislative assembly, national anthem and capital city.
But I can’t select that flag. Oh no. I can select the flag of “Neutral Zone”, whatever that is, but not Wales.
I can select the flag of The Falkland islands, a flag which actually has a sheep on it. Jesus, you’re just trolling now, aren’t you?
Zwift, you need to get your shit together. Seriously.
(Update: Apparently, Zwift use ISO 3166 and ISO places Wales under the UK. Apparently. But not The Falklands. Which is a British dependency.)
(Update 2: There’s also no Scottish flag, no Ulster flag, and no European stars. But you can select the flag of Pitcairn, a tiny island nation with fewer than 100 residents)
Race recap: Tour of Sufferlandria, Stages 6-9
The last post left us at the middle of the tour, after the first mountain stage, and looking ahead to four more days including both the queen stage and a big final run into the finish.
Stage six: Local Hero saw the peloton turned ragged by the cruel pyramid intervals, and several riders were caught out by forgetting that this one isn’t just an hour of effort, but an hour and twenty-five minutes of threshold work designed to put them into the redzone and deny them an easy exit. A pyramid starts out at an RPE of 7/10, or just below power threshold. In my case, working with a slightly overloaded FTP of 250, that meant holding 240+W for interval one. Interval two, a minute at threshold, is at least 250W for one minute, after which you spend two minutes at 8.0 – above threshold, which is harsh. But when the two minutes are up, you can’t just shift and recover. Because you need to hold threshold for another minute, then sub-threshold again for a last painful minute.
The pyramids hurt. I am not kidding. And after that there’s race simulation and a series of sprints. This stage was a test for the entire peloton, and there were three more stages to go.
Next day, at first glance, seemed like an opportunity to recover a little, with The Rookie. But things are never that easy in Sufferlandria, especially when Sir Neal Henderson has been involved in the choice of parcours. What awaited us was a set of three 10-minute race simulations garnished with the kind of on-bike footage that gets you trapped in the action and forgetting how much power you’re putting down. I, for one, was left gasping, and dreading Stage Eight, The Queen Stage
Serious face on for Stage Eight
Stage Eight was the Dame Alissa Schubert Memorial Stage, a terrifying two-hours and twenty-five minutes of sprints. The community wore a black stripe on their social media avatars in memory of Dame Alissa, and the Knights wore their official team kits. I broke out my race-cut Darkside kit. Having put on a few kilograms after a bunch of crashes and injuries last year, I’d been slightly dreading getting back into race-cut, but to my surprise, it worked out not too badly. I slapped on my serious face and got down to action.
Video one of Stage Eight, Revolver. Straight up, no messing, fifteen one-minute intervals interpersed with fifteen one-minute rests, a workout designed to burn you down as quickly and as simply as possible. This is followed with Violator, a never-ending series of short, high-intensity sprints, which is topped off with a dressing of Half is Easy, yet another bottomless pit of on-off-on-off power intervals.
This, dear friends, is a special kind of hell.
We all knew it would be the queen stage. I for one didn’t realise quite how horrifying it would turn out to be.
I held over the stage until Sunday, since Saturday was my brother-in-law’s 50th birthday and Jack Bobridge’s Hour Record attempt. Which meant on Sunday I felt a little… hungover.
Oh. The. Pain.
By the end of Revolver I was already thinking I’d gone too deep. By the middle of Violator, I knew I’d gone too deep. close to the end of Violator, I had a dizzy spell and a micro-blackout and found myself almost crashing the bike. Let me just re-iterate that. I nearly. Crashed. A turbo trainer.
As the recovery interval arrived I wolfed down an entire pack of jelly snakes, a gel and a whole bottle of electrolyte, and called out to the minions for more.
By the time Half is Easy was properly underway, I was mentally back together, and starting to come back into shape physically, which was just as well, because I spent the last video spitting and cursing, sweat pouring off in waves, feet and hands aching, legs turning to mush and shoulders in spasm. Physically, it was harder than anything on my Knighthood, either of my Everesting attempts, and any race I’ve ever struggled through.
The sawtooth profile of the power trace speaks volumes for the severity of this stage. Oh god, never again.
Well, maybe.
It did feel pretty good afterwards.
And so Monday rolled around, and my alarm fired at 5am, in time for me to do Stage Nine before work. My weary legs, however, wouldn’t let me out of bed.
So I went to work like a normal monday. And when I arrived, I set one of my laptop’s auxiliary clocks to the International date line. This gave me a hard cut off time for the end of Stage Nine, which turned out to be quite late that evening, thanks to timezone weirdness.
So I left the office as normal, headed home, and put my weary legs over the top tube for the last time in this tour.
It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time tells the tale of an intrepid Sufferlandrian unleashed in pursuit of the Giro d’Italia’s combativity prize. It’s tough, you’d better believe it, and it’s long at two hours. And coming at the end of nine stages, it was all I could do to keep up. But keep up I did, and I finished, sweaty and victorious, after the world’s hardest stage race of a fictional country.
My citizenship of the great nation of Sufferlandria was assured.
And I was tired
Damn it, I was tired.
I can’t wait until next year.
Park Bikes Training Camp Day Two: Kangaroo Valley
Day two and there were plenty of tired bodies at the breakfast table. Start was delayed somewhat by heavy fog, so extra calories were taken on board and even more coffee put away. Meanwhile down in the bike room, the support crew were doing a sterling job on the maintenance side, making sure everyone’s gears were running smoothly, checking over tyres for leaks and swapping out a couple of cassettes for riders who’d overgeared a little. I really can’t speak highly enough of the support squad and the great job they did.
Soon the fog cleared and the bunch rolled out into Bowral town centre and off towards Fitzroy Falls. The terrain was rolling and soon we’d broken into two bunches, with me in the back group. Cresting a hill I saw the support car ahead with the front group and decided to bridge the gap and wake up my tired legs, which I’ll admit were feeling less than stellar.
Regrouping at Fitzroy Falls, we were treated to a clinic on descending technique, since the meat of the day was coming up – Barrengarry descent and the climb back out of the valley, on slightly damp roads.
My cornering confidence has been a little low since spilling at Olympic Park and cracking my rib, so my preparation was pretty much all mental. Remember the fundamentals – brake in a straight line and in plenty of time. Look through the corner. Weight on the outside foot and the inside hand, balanced through the centre of the bike. Don’t target fixate on the hazards. Relax. Continue Reading →
A Knight’s Tale
I turned 40 last week. I am now officially a MAMIL. To mark this milestone, I decided I wanted to do something big on the bike.
Everesting was my first choice. I’ve had two unsuccessful attempts before – both ending prematurely due to equipment failure – and the desire to finally get it done has been burning a hole in my head. So on Oct 24th I headed out bright and early towards Glenbrook Gorge in the Blue Mountains National Park, and the 11% 700m Glenbrook Gorge North Climb.
Successfully everesting this climb would take 107 repeats over maybe thirteen hours. I had a van full of water bottles and food, a few changes of kit and plenty of spares. I’d even gone and bought a new pair of Zipp 60 Carbon wheels just in case my trusty but slightly troublesome Zipp 30s gave up the ghost.
I was, you may say, prepared.
However the weather wasn’t exactly co-operating. Driving towards the mountains on the M4, the lower slopes of the plateau were lit up by lightning strikes, and I had an uneasy feeling. Sure, the outlook for the latter part of the day was pretty good, but there was more rain forecast mid-morning, and the sky was looking very much unsettled.
Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I parked up, got my wind vest on, prepped the bike and set out for a few exploratory repeats.
Which is where the plan started to unravel.
The descent into the gorge was wet and slippery. Worse, it had an oily sheen on the surface, so the descent very nervous indeed. I puzzled over this for a moment and came to the conclusion that runoff from the surrounding eucalypts must have been to blame for the oiliness. Riding up on the first lap was a bit of a strain but bearable, but the second descent was no less nervous than the first. The climb, at least, felt more comfortable than the first. I still wanted this to happen but with a cracked rib still an occasionally- painful reminder of a crash in late September, I wasn’t entirely enthusiastic. One more repeat and I was convinced – without the ability to go downhill fast I’d be losing valuable time, and worse, I’d be risking an injury on every single descent until dry road emerged sometime in the late morning. I don’t mind riding in the rain usually, but spending my 40th birthday waiting for x-rays would definitely wreck things. To compound the feeling of dread, the rain restarted, and thunder rumbled.
So I finished the lap, headed for the safety of my van and came up with an alternative plan.
The torture chamber
I would go home, stick the bike on the turbo trainer and go for Sufferlandrian Knighthood. Ten Sufferfests, back to back, with only ten minutes rest between each.
Yes, that would do it. At home, in the dry, with a fridge full of Belgian beer nearby. Knighthood had been hovering on my horizon for a while. Time to get it done.
So I cued up ten of the best, threw a coffee down my neck and got started. Continue Reading →
