Zwift Racing League round 5: rider roundup

Tomorrow is the final round of the the first season of this winter's Zwift Racing League and both the road.cc teams – the Choppers in C and the Ballers in B – are doing just fine. To be honest the main yardstick for this kind of stuff is: has it been a good laugh? And the answer, I'd suggest, is yes. Yes it has. If you want to get involved for next season then fill in this form.

I didn't race last week: we had seven in Cs and with nearly 700m of climbing it very much wasn't a course to suit my skills (sitting in on the flat and busting out a sprint), so I sat it out. Well, sat it out and raced a different race. A flat race. Which I won.

Anyway, some other people wrote some words, which, thanks to a rather busy schedule at the end of last week and a 400km audax on the weekend (more on that soon) I've only just got round to collating. So (just) ahead of the final round, here's last week's report!

Richard Livingstone (C)

I was looking forward to this one. Having been promoted after round 1 to a tougher division, I thought the team could show up well this week and personally, my ambition was not to get dropped immediately the road turned upwards. Mostly my year has been long distance endurance so the return of Zwift racing has been interesting and frequently viewed from somewhere out the back, in a fun but slightly nauseous way...

Anyway, to the action. After some discussion of tactics ("Scott - I'll try and hang on as long as possible") and bikes, the action got underway with a longish lead in and the blob sticking together mostly up the first climb. Iwein and Dan once again starred for Team RCC Choppers and Dave and Daz did a grand job of hanging on too. I inevitably got spat out near the top of the first climb so, familiar times here, nice little Z3/4 gruppetto at the back again. That meant my lungs weren't trying to escape out of my chest up the long climb of the evening. Which was nice. Lots of powerups on offer too and that supertuck on the way down was working a treat as I got off to chase my cat away from the fan.

In the end, the awesome Iwein got 90 of our 185 points including 18 for first across the line and the team came 4th overall, which was a decent result. Nice postmatch chat on Discord, a warmdown and looking forward to the final round next week.

 

Robert Sweatman (B)

Glyph Heights beckoned for week 5, very much a climbers course with 600m over 34km, but only two segment point opportunities.  For the first segment (Itza KOM, 3.8km @ 2%, FAL and FTS ) a decision was needed as this was immediately followed by a further 2km climb at 8.7%. Joe White and Adam Reynolds successfully committed themselves to the Itza KOM (placing 3rd and 8th), while I spread my effort over the whole climb. Joe is a strong climber (even though he wasn't feeling that well before the event) and was able to stay with the leading group. Adam fell back a little but then got stuck in no man's land, and I used the rest of the climb, and the aerotuck on the descent, to get into the top ten. The final scoring segment (FTS) was the Mayan Mountainside KOM (3.0%) and the end of the race.  Joe, myself and Adam finished 4th, 6th and 15th respectively.

Darryl Pottinger (C)

I had a plan: stay in the pack until the hills, then ride the big climbs about 90% threshold, try and get a rest on the descent and hang in there up the final hill to the finish.

Being a newbie to Zwift Racing League I found the races longer than I had been used to in Zwift and faded (blew up lol) around the 45 min mark. This time I got it pretty spot on I pushed on the hills about 3 w/kg, and got a KOM personal best so I was happy with the effort. I still dropped out of the pack and hovered around 42nd place. The descent was harder than I thought due to small hard sprints to keep the super tuck after each little climb. At the bottom I was in 43rd spot and a bit in no man's land: about 15 secs behind the person ahead and around 50 secs ahead of the next group. I managed about 2.9w/kg to the end and kept 43rd; I was a bit too worried that I'd blow up on the last climb to go all out chasing one spot!

I got a few points for the team and we grabbed 4th overall due to some amazing efforts from the other team members. This Racing League is a real buzz. It's great to ride with Road CC 😁

After five rounds the Ballers are in a comfortable mid-table sixth and the Choppers are eighth out of ten, a position in a football league where you'd probably be described as "looking over your shoulder". Not that any of that matters in the grand scheme of things: we've done some racing and it's been fun. Join us for the next season!

Race with road.cc in the ZRL next season! First race Tuesday 12 November