Lucianotes: Libby Hill After “Party”

Editor’s note: Luciano Pollastri’s notes about the Zwift racing experience caught our eye for their humor and insightfulness,and when we asked to publish his work here on Zwift Insider he happily assented. Here’s his latest entry, all about yesterday’s Zwift Racing League event. Want to read more? Get the full list of Lucianotes >

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Libby Hill After Party: you will agree that the guy at Zwift who had the impudence to call the first 30km a “party” is to be hated by all of us, right? Words have meaning, and using them in such a misleading way is without a doubt a criminal offense, a form of torture punishable under article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  

That being said, the “Party” started exactly at 5wkg for four minutes. While the usual monsters from CLS and Kirchmair riding disc wheels were having fun torturing the rest of the peloton, Peter, the captain, was permanently shouting at us not to panic and to stay protected in the draft. That’s what we all did… kind of.

Because the plan we all agreed on was to destroy the race at Km8 just before the first sprint, hoping some Vikings and WTRL Beet-it would help us to distance the lightest riders. But we had to abort the operation as we were already all dying just trying to stay with the group. All except Andoni aka Tchernobyl. We call him like this because of the watt generation he is able to deploy, and this time he decided he would try an escape by himself. He left the pack for 2km, raising the flag of the Jerbos big time. Grande Andoooooooooooniii!!!!

And then Libby Hill appears: 1 minute and 30 seconds of pure joy and harmony according to the same guy who called the first part a “party”.

Without surprise, Edu, the best rider of our team, managed to follow the leading pack. Edu is a Transformer. He has this unique capacity to turn himself into a dragster for any time needed. Mon (stands for Ramón) and I were experiencing the basic laws of gravity in our own unique ways: while I was feeling I had a dozen elephants hanging from my back wheel, Mon was taking off like a SpaceX rocket. Oskr wished for the tenth time he could be a lighter rider, cursing how most of the ZRL season 2 stages have a fatal climb and promising to get revenge in next week’s TTT. Peter was citing in circles all the humanly known synonyms of “I’m toast”.

When things get really difficult, our Discord channel usually goes silent and we focus on pushing on the pedals as hard as possible. The silence today quickly turned into a series of heavy breathing noises.

Let me correct this, as heavy asphyxiating noises would be a more accurate description. Anyone joining our voice channel at this point would have believed we were shooting a movie definitely forbidden to children.

The variety of sounds coming out of our lungs in such circumstances is something requiring a clinical study or at least a National Geographic documentary which would go like this: 

“In periods of competition, each Zwifter has his own specific grunt which can be heard up to 25km away, and is only recognizable by his herd. This snarl is usually accompanied by a repulsive facial expression indicating a tremendous amount of pain or fear. The most common situations where a Zwitfer uses his grunt are when in danger of being distanced by the leading pack or the immediate 10 seconds prior to faint climbing a hill of Watopia. It can also happen beyond 6wkg, 185 HRM or anywhere in Alpe du Zwift”.

By now I am sure you are asking yourself about our final ranking and why I am using a multitude of diversion techniques not to mention it. Thanks for the question. And you are spot on: I would rather avoid the subject as it is still an open wound.