My Zwift Racing League team (ZESP Jerbos) has a particular bond with Greatest London Flat: we won that stage in the first ZRL season in our division. Our first and only victory! (I’ll wait for the applause.) So we got a little emotional racing this course for the final race of season 3, and at the same time, we felt it was our territory and we had something to defend.
In TTT’s, I guess like all the teams, we agree on an order of relay: Peter goes first, then Edu, Oskr third, then Alberto, then Andoni, then me. But no more than 5 minutes in and any resemblance between the initial plan and what is actually happening is pure coincidence.
This time was no different. Edu and Peter tried once again to coordinate the team at least superficially, but very quickly “the order” was replaced by a shambolic sequence of “I go now!!!!” or “My turn!!!!!” on Discord. Sometimes two “I go!!!” collided, and then nobody went or both went, adding an additional layer of chaos to the chaos. But it is OUR Chaos, with a capital C. We are very proud of it and nobody outside the team is authorized to criticize OUR Chaos. Remember that with OUR Chaos we won this very same stage in the first season so pay some respect please. (I’ll wait for your applause once again.)
Add to this that two of us seemed to constantly be lagging by 100 meters and it looked like anything but an organized team, even by Mediterranean standards.
25km down the road, we were competing with the WTRL Mercenaries and the Vikings Mjolnir. The battle was fierce, grabbing one second, losing one. I don’t need to explain to all of you the incredible pride you experience when six feel one. It may be called virtual or e-cycling, there is nothing virtual about the fact that we are a team, a team of real people working so closely together that at one point it felt as if we shared the same heart rate.
Ok, ok… I hear you saying, “Come on, what a cheesy comment”, and you have a point. I am a little emotional, and have tendency to turn myself into a Mexican Telenovelas scenarist. So when you read this last paragraph imagine there is cheap and pretentious music playing in the background, and some fake tears are rolling on my cheeks. Now it’s 100% cheesy, right?
Well, I still maintain that we shared a heart rate.
Upon arrival, just like every other Tuesday, we reinvented how things went, heroically magnifying our achievements and abusively ignoring our failures, pretending the important thing is to participate, not the results. At the same time, each of us was obsessively clicking on the mouse refreshing the WTRL and ZwiftPower websites to get the team results and analyze our individual statistics.
This time mine were utterly laughable, but this is absolutely private. Please don’t tell anyone. I would not want my performance to be metaphorically compared to one of those absurdly slow or weak animals like a turtle or snail. I still remember that time where I was told given my wattage output I may be downgraded to the newly created ZwiftPower “oyster” categor. The idea was totally justified, and certainly any oyster looking at my numbers this day would have been offended by the comparison.
In the end we finished 4th out of 17, beating Vikings and WRTL by less than a second with Andoni again exploding the w/kg average, Oskr generating a draft similar to a black hole, and Alberto swallowing the non-flat part of Greatest London Flat like Bernard Hinault, our common idol. Edu and Peter, well, they are still trying to make sense of OUR Chaos as the cement of the team they are.
Season 2: check.
This season we were placed one division higher than in the first season. We thought we were going to be eaten alive by all the teams we’d watched with admiration and respect. It has been two months full of emotions, laughs, personal records, and above all incredible camaraderie and friendship.
Ready for season 3.
ZESP Jerbos forever.
wpDiscuz
