Last Saturday I joined the André Greipel ride on ZWIFT. It was my first group ride in ZWIFT. The plan was to take it easy, but at the back of my head there was a will to check how far am I with my power estimation versus the one I actually could sustain for a full hour. How did it go?
First of all maybe a short introduction what this ride was about anyway – as it was not a typical coffee ride with a famous “Pro”. It was a virtual ride on ZWIFT that was intended to raise awareness and funds for the ALS foundation that Andre has created. Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, ALS in short, is a terrible disease, hitting an average 2,6 people on 100000 in Europe. It usually does affect people around 50-60 on age. And what is the most terrifying in it – there is no actual treatment to cure it, only symptomatic healing. So you can imagine it is important to raise awareness about it. With early diagnosis chances of slowing down the illness (it’ not curable currently) are higher. You can find more information on Andy’s ALS dedicated website.
Ok, back to the ride. The leader or rather the organiser of the whole event can be found on André profile at ZWIFT website. How did it look like? Phenomenal! Take a look yourself on a video from one of the riders from Saturday:
On on side it was nearly around 6000 people on their bike in front of their monitors. This gives a lot of motivation and really helps you push harder than on an usual training session. The old saying
A bad race is better than the best training
was true again. The beginning was stronger than I estimated to ride at all. I’ve caught up a group that rode around 160W FTP and continued with them for the first 20 minutes. Than unfortunately this speed and effort appeared to be too much, and despite much effort I’ve couldn’t keep up and have gradually dropped lower. The power dropped to around 100W, with periodic increases to about 130W. This reminded me of doing intervals between 100 and 130W in 2 minute / 1 minute intervals. So nothing to be proud of.
On the other side I’ve gained some confidence in riding with a larger group of riders and as I resuscitated after around next 30 minutes I came back with some more power around 140W for the last 5 minutes of the ride. A good warmup does show to be needed in my case – even if it lasts for 40 minutes.
As an conclusion – Group E with average 2-2,5W/kg is still a bit too strong for me. Which was understandable with the power generated seen before. But it was much fun and was made in a good cause so has to be counted in general as a plus.
And the ride – be the numbers:
And the end result is an increase in estimated FTP! That is something that helps a bit to restore faith in the training and progress. I thought that going through the same beginner training would be a bad decision and a waste of time. But maybe it was not… Maybe there is a sense in getting things slower at the beginning, when the season is still not quite on the horizon. There will be time to get out of the 100W league to a bit higher one. And maybe one day even to join the middle of the pack at least is such a ride.
Cover photo courtesy by Simon Connellan on Unsplash
Caesar's Cycling 