ZRL Race 4 - Don't let people ride away from you...
Another Tuesday night, and another evening taking part in the fun that is the Zwift Racing League*. I'd had a pretty good Tuesday, and was really ready and looking forward to the race. I had a rough plan, and was looking forwards to improving on my previous efforts.
Having had so much benefit, in my mind at least, from having recce'd the Innsbruck course the week before I did the same around Harrogate on Monday - as the route was a couple of laps of the UCI Worlds Course ("2019 UCI Worlds Harrogate Circuit" Route Details (Yorkshire) - Zwift Insider) and this meant I had a plan... go hard to start with, stay in the lead group until the KoM and try and do better than last week. (It wasn't the most detailed plan - but not a bad one all things considered - just a shame I didn't stick to it!)
For once I wasn't quite as rushed as normal, and was actually set-up and on the bike with about 25 minutes to go before the start. So a nice steady 20 minutes warm-up, and a chat with the rest of the team on Discord - where we discussed race tactics, decided none of us had any, and we were ready to go.
The race started as expected - and I managed to get in the front group and stay with them for some time - but not quite as long as I'd planned. And really, that was the story of my race - at least 4 times I just mistimed my efforts, or lost concentration so the group gained a bit of a gap on me, and each time I slipped further down the placings... but it did culminate in the slowest sprint finish of all time that I just managed to sneak. So I'm hanging on to that!
Overall I felt this was the best race that I have done so far - and I'm slowly learning the nuances of how Zwift racing works. Although my position may not have been any different from last week, it felt a lot more controlled and gives me a lot of confidence that I can keep improving. Now if I could only find another 20 watts from somewhere so I wasn't in the red quite so much for the next race...
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