ZRL Race 3 - Race Report from the Back

Tuesday night is race night, and last night saw us take on the Innsbruck After Party route - for those not familiar with this on Zwift it is 3 laps of the town followed by one final 'small' hill (just the 7.4K) up to the top of the KOM.  (See Zwift Racing League Season 2: Week 3 Details (Innsbruck KOM After Party) - Zwift Insider for a detailed analysis of the route).

Whilst I know my relative position within the B racing group, my objectives are relatively simple:

1. Do better than last time
2. Improve FTP

The reality from last night is that I just about managed 1, and not 2 - but looking at the stats it wasn't as rubbish as I thought last night when I'd finished; maybe its just natural we all beat ourselves up a bit about not getting faster?

So, to the race last night.  I suspect, like many juggling working from home
, home schooling and everything else Covid in the UK brings us right now, I don't think my preparation was ideal.  On Monday evening I'd managed to find some time in the evening on the turbo, so decided to do an easy recce of the route - intention was to try not to put any real fatigue into the system, but to reduce the trepidation on race night, and I have to say that this worked well.

Tuesday evening came along with me finishing work, and then tucking into a nice evening meal about 90 minutes before the race start.  Once I'd eaten it was time to get the youngest to bed, with a bath and story, then return to finish watching an episode of "The Bay" with my wife that we were part way through.  Its now 20 minutes to race start and I'm still in the house, not changed, and not on the start line!  Grabbing my mobile I start Zwift and bag a place at the start, not too far from the front, quickly get changed, grab all my electronics and head out to the garage where the turbo lives.  Amazingly I manage to log-on through the PC, get onto Discord to talk to the team, and get on course with still 15 minutes before the banner drops.  To get the legs ticking over I slowly ramp up the power and throw 4 lots of 30 second efforts in to try and get the legs ready, and then its back to the start for the race.  And here's how it went:

Most of the detail and my thoughts are captured in the video - but here's what went well:

• I got power down early and managed to get into the lead group rather than riding the race on my own
• As expected on the first leg snapper the race broke up, but I settled into a group riding at a power that made sense and settled in for the laps to get to the KOM, where the plan was to put a good final effort in
• I really enjoyed the race, and finished further up the field than race 1

This is what went badly:

• When I got to the KOM I couldn't, or perhaps thought I couldn't, put in the power to push up the hill
• I lost about 17 places on the climb, with people taking a lot of time out of me
• My total KOM was only 2 minutes quicker in the race than on my easy spin the day before - I suspect there is quite a bit more in the tank!  (I just need to stop doubting myself so much)

As I mentioned earlier I was feeling pretty gutted about my performance on the hill - I've certainly put in far better performances when riding AdZ for fun...  but when I look at my ZwiftPower curve whilst yesterday's performance didn't improve anything, it was pretty much in line with my longer power efforts.

So, it seems clear that I need to think about how to focus on building some endurance base so that I can hold and hit those powers after having been on the bike for a bit already.  Given I rarely train for more than an hour (including warm-up and cool-down) this probably isn't that much of a surprise!

If anyone out there makes it down to this end of the blog, and have some ideas on what I should be doing to improve this, please do let me know and leave a comment below.