Because a picture is worth a thousand words, let me start with two thousand words: the following two pictures are taken from the pen.
Yes, I am the guy in pink, and this is very illustrative of my experience during the entire race: it felt like having a colonoscopy done without anesthesia while, at the same time, someone was crushing my testicles.
Excuse my language but I am writing this only 15 minutes after the race and every single inch of my body is still hurting. Nothing positive can come out of my brain for a while.
This is only my third race in A Category with the Coalition team. I died during the TTT for close to two-thirds of the race, becoming dead weight for the entire team. Especially sad since I gave it all I had, breaking my 10-minute power record.
In the second race, I had fun. A lot of fun, in fact. I was in the third pack, and helped chase the second one with a substantial contribution in the flats. We finally managed to join them with a great collective effort, even if the final kilometer was confirmation that I am the worst sprinter ever. In the hierarchy of fastest animals in the world, me pedaling a bike would be somewhere between a snail and a turtle, and that affirmation is in itself a huge offense to all snails and turtles of the world. To be fair to the snails, a fast snail might be faster than me.
Preparing for the third race, which was in Makuri Islands on the Flatland Loop, all the images of my trip to Japan in 2018 came back to me.
On many occasions during the recent lockdowns I’ve had serious nostalgia for Japan. I fell in love with Japan. Everything is aesthetic, everything is harmonious. I can’t wait to go back to Kyoto, to Shirakawa-go, to Miyama, to experience Sakura… but that’s another story.
Just to give you a final flavour of my addiction to Japan, when Makuri Islands world opened on Zwift, I spent two entire months only riding there. Workouts, meet-ups… everything.
Harmony, peace, generosity… Those were the words best describing my state of mind when joining the pen.
That positive feeling immediately disintegrated when the timer went to 0 and the pack left at 6,5 wkg for a km, spreading corpses in the back of the pack almost instantaneously. You could guess the casualties were already crying like babies on the side of the road as if they had gone through “the Barkley marathon” (if you don’t know what it is, search it on Netflix and prepare yourself to watch the craziest guys in the world racing the most difficult race in the world).
No break at all, no pause at all until the sprint in km 4,7, and then the climb…. and three times.
Let’s push the pause button now to pay my respects and highest admiration to Sherpa Dave.
Dave is producing DS notes for each race or TTT, with detailed instructions like the following one. Chapeau!
If you have not done it yet, you should definitely subscribe to his Youtube channel.
Now, after some compliments, let me tell you how angry I am at you Dave, since for this one it was all flowers and beautiful music while you should have warned all of us that this was going to be hell! You should have shouted at us to escape, to leave if we had one ounce of intelligence!
Going back to the race, I was left in the second pack at the end of the first climb. Everybody will understand when I explain how the guy just ahead of me started to become smaller in the screen, no matter how hard I pushed on the pedals, until he disappeared with the rest of the group. How lonely can you feel in those moments? Well, that’s exactly the moment when Tom, the captain of the team, decided to appear and be the teammate I would lean on. Suffering together was our fate today.
However, suffering did not seem to be exactly what some of the members of the pack were experiencing as one of them wrote in the chat “Come on! Let’s catch them back! Push harder!”
To which Tom answered “If I had the legs I would not be here but 30 seconds ahead!”
On my side, I was just amazed those guys were able to write! I could barely read nor remember my name and those guys were chit-chatting, trash-talking, and exchanging about the pros and cons between rim and disc brakes, or the type of sushi they like the best.
If at least they were writing about their legs burning as if someone had ignited a nuclear reaction in their quadriceps, or about the rhythm of their breathing being close to the one of a hummingbird, or their incapacity to articulate words, as if Tyson Fury had been beating them non-stop for ten rounds…
Why don’t you light a cigar and sip a scotch on the rocks at the same time, just to push the humiliation to the most extreme level possible?
As I was already the lousiest sprinter in category B, so I was anticipating I would finish last in this pack if I did not manage to split it in two or three. To keep the story short: I failed.
The sprint went exactly as expected: I finished 22nd out of the 23 members of the group, crossing the line just before an average snail and just behind a turtle and a fast snail.
Don’t refrain from making fun of me. This is happy hour. 😊
End of the story.
Now if you don’t mind I am going to bed and forget about today.
Don’t despair Luciano! All the slower snails think you’re cool and dream about becoming just like you one day.
To paraphrase an athlete from another sport, “Do you know how good you have to be to suck in Zwift A races?”
Brilliant tale of pain and suffering. We’ve all been there but you describe it so well.
FYI I would give my left one to be as good as Category A.