ODZ SkillZ and DrillZ Ride – December 7

Today was another edition in our “Race Smarter not Harder” series where we practiced the art of bridging. And, yes, it is an art.

Before we get into the ride, let’s talk about racing smarter. As new racers, just as in rock climbing, we tend to rely on our perceived superiority in terms of fitness or strength, and that works until you move out of the CAT 5 ranks or up to the Cs or Bs in Zwift. Suddenly, riders who clearly can’t match your strength or fitness level hang with you and then beat you in the last 200 meters. Soon, you start getting really aggravated and begin launching multiple attacks well above your FTP, yet that same rider just sits there in sixth wheel until the end of the race, where he/she pips you at the line… again. You get more aggressive, and then you suddenly are getting dropped from the lead bunch because you are out of gas from the constant attacks.

What went wrong? Your FTP is higher than ever. Your body fat is in the single digits. Your leg muscles ripple like Peter Sagan’s. Yet that chubby old guy keeps linking you.

That’s because the chubby, old guy races with his brain and not his ego.

This leads us directly into a discussing of bridging. Last week we worked on responding to attacks by playing the crack the whip game. Responding to attacks is an important skill, but do you need to respond to every attack? How many of those efforts do you have in your legs, and will you be able to finish the race off if you cover every move? The answer is no–you probably do not have to respond to every attack.

So what happens if we don’t follow an attack, and a break forms or we lose a small group off of the front? That’s where the ability to bridge comes into play. The reason I call bridging an art is because you need to combine a feel for the race, knowledge of the course and other riders, and rolling calculus into your decision-making process. On the fly, you have to determine how hard you need to go for how long to cross a fluctuating gap. Oh, by the way, you have to ensure that you don’t gas yourself so much that you reach your target group too tired to hang with them or respond to any accelerations. It is demoralizing to bridge to a group only to get dropped immediately.

For today’s SkillZ and DrillZ, we practiced crossing gaps of various distances to a rider holding a variety of power levels. Like responding to attacks, it is important to not overshoot your target unless you plan on attacking immediately. For our purposes, though, we wanted to bridge and then sit on the group to recover.

With the help of TeamODZ member Justin L., we set up the exercise. Justin launched a ten second hard attack, dropped to 3.0 w/kg for 30 seconds, and settled at 2.0 w/kg until a group formed on him. During the first iteration, the group was slow to respond when given the green light to bridge. That made for a much longer effort than was planned, but it worked out. After a regrouping, we repeated the exercise but with Justin getting a bigger gap. This time it worked much better, with the biggest improvement being the reduction in the number of riders going into the orange during the bridge.

As we talked about earlier, bridging is about managing your effort. Going into the orange (referring to your w/kg numbers going orange in Zwift) means that you just lit a match. How long you hold that effort determines how many matches you burned from your finite book of matches. Therefore, you only want to go as hard as needed to cross the gap.

IRL racing is a little harder to judge, but Zwift gives you near perfect information regarding the gap to cross and the effort of the riders you are chasing. I say “near perfect” because you cannot see how much they are suffering or if they have a Black & Decker hooked up to the trainer.

The final bridging exercise was an individual effort.  Judging how people were responding on previous efforts, I decided to not send everyone all at once to bridge the gap. Instead, I made the riders wait until I called their respective names or messaged them. I sent the riders who were not as high on the power scale first, and the hammerheads last.  What that did was create a much bigger gap for the stronger riders to cover than the other riders.  During the previous exercises, the time gap was rarely over 20 seconds, so the bridge was not substantial.  However, in the last iteration, the gap got to well over a minute for the later bridgers.  By the time we all got back together, some of the later riders really understood the importance of dosing out the effort rather than going orange early.

After about 45 minutes, while we were wrapping up, one of the riders asked if we could go for the forward sprint.  Being the gracious host that I am, I gave my consent… with a caveat.  We would start our sprint from inside the village, rather than at the sprint line.  Besides just enjoying adding a little torture to the mix, I wanted to reiterate a point from an SDR a few weeks ago: starting the sprint early can be a very bad thing.  That nice long sprint put some pain in peoples’ legs, and the lactic acid caused many to sit up well before the sprint banner.  Lesson learned.

Next week, we will have something special for the group, so make sure you attend.  Until then, Ride On!

Today’s class was streamed live on Zwift Live on Facebook. Watch the full video replay here >

ODZ SkillZ and DrillZ Ride – November 30

From the start, we had a big, feisty group with many on Discord. That made it easy to communicate the plan of the day, and I will say that the Discord users had a leg up on the other participants. The game really has one rule: stay behind the leader. That leader was me for the first lap and change.

Crack the Whip goes like this: the leader makes an attack of up to one minute as hard as he/she desires. Then the leader sits up to let the group catch on. The group has to respond and catch the leader without passing the leader. The object of the game is to recognize and cover attacks without being put on the front yourself. The purpose of this is to not allow another rider to trick you into expending extra energy by making a short attack, knowing that you will overshoot your target which would allow him/her to sit on your wheel. If the chasers overshoot the attacker, they have to drop back through the group, stop pedaling for ten seconds, and then chase back on. The action runs for five to ten minutes for each session of Crack the Whip. Thus, if a rider continues to pay the penalty, it gets harder and harder.

For our group, it was a bloodbath from the beginning. After my first few attacks, I eased up to the 1.5 w/kg pace, trying not to be too sneaky. Half of the group still rocketed right by me, not paying attention to my output or the rapidly closing gap.

Because of the difficulty of maintaining order with the majority of the people not being on Discord, I shifted to Phase II punishment immediately. Interestingly enough, people found that sitting up and having to sprint to catch back on the group was a sufficient deterrent to at least try not to fly by me.

We conducted multiple iterations of the game, regrouping periodically to allow everyone the opportunity to be at the front. To be honest, the drawback to having a lot of participants was that many riders could not see my information on the rider list, causing a delay in their response or unknowingly shooting right by me. The beacon was a big help, but it wasn’t big enough for some.

On the last lap, we switched up the attack to multiple attackers. It added a little confusion to the mix but created a more realistic experience, as most races have multiple animators. We finished off the ride by revisiting our group skills and then a brief cool down.

The big takeaway from today’s ride was to really focus on paying attention to moves off the front. Being able to respond quickly means that you get to conserve energy by getting into the attacker’s draft earlier. Likewise, you will have a better opportunity to decide whether you want to counterattack immediately or force the attacker to do more work at the front.

Like today, the remaining SkillZ and DrillZ Rides through the end of the year will focus on racing smarter. We’ll go into a deeper discussion during the 7 December SDR. Until then, Ride On!

Watch the ride recording below: