Some races are lost on the climb.
Others on the descent.
Mine was lost at the front door — with a baby monitor as co-pilot.
The setting was perfect. Racing with Team NL Cloud 9 Thunder in a Ladder race against my former teammates from Wahoo Esports, on Cobbled Climbs. Short, sharp efforts. Repeated accelerations. Chaos with intent. Exactly my kind of race. Exactly the terrain where I was determined to show my old mates nothing but my rear wheel.
But the first real battle had already started long before the start pen.
My youngest son was sick. High fever. Unsettled. Inconsolable. With my wife due home late, I had stationed a baby monitor right next to my Zwift setup. As I clipped in, I silently negotiated with fate: please no blue crying lights during the race. Just let me get through this one.
To prevent my two boys from repeatedly checking whether their mother had arrived yet, I made what would later turn out to be a catastrophic tactical decision: I locked the front door from the inside, using the hook.
Ten minutes before the race, the house finally went quiet. I started with cold legs and a fatigued mind, skipping any real warmup. Not ideal — but manageable.
At the start line, another complication. One rider from our team was missing. Confusion, quick chat, and then a decision: we would race four versus four anyway. Whether Wahoo Esports was also short a rider or simply chose sportsmanship, I honestly don’t know — but the race was on.
The first lap hurt, as expected. Then the legs woke up. The rhythm settled. The repeated surges began to feel controlled rather than desperate. The group thinned, the pace sharpened, and I found myself exactly where I wanted to be — in the front selection, feeling stronger with every acceleration.
That’s when I heard it.
Not the baby monitor.
The front door.
Loud knocking.
My wife was home.
And locked out.
I unclipped mid-race and sprinted across the house in cycling shoes. Door open. Quick explanation. Door closed again. A full anaerobic effort back to the bike. Back on. Straight into damage-control mode.
By sheer adrenaline and stubbornness, I managed to claw my way back to the front group just before the next climb. Heart rate pinned. Legs already flooded. Zero margin left.
The elastic snapped immediately.
As the group surged uphill, I had nothing. No kick. No response. Just the slow, inevitable slide backward as the watts refused to come back. The climb didn’t beat me — domestic logistics did.
The race wasn’t lost on Cobbled Climbs.
It wasn’t lost tactically.
It was lost in cycling shoes somewhere between the Zwift setup and the front door.
Lesson learned: always recon the course —
and always, always unlock the house.
wpDiscuz
