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:

ODZ SkillZ and DrillZ Ride – November 23

As usual, we started our ride with a few minutes of warm-up at an easier pace. I was riding the big wheel with the beacon, so most people were able to stay behind or only slightly in front of my avatar. The 1.5 – 1.8 w/kg pace always seems stiff enough to keep everyone pedaling but not so hard that people get easily dropped.

Once we made the turn toward the first sprint banner, I laid out the plan for the first break-chasing exercise. Out of our group of 50, 3 riders would attack for 30 seconds at 3.0 w/kg. Then they would reduce to 2.0 w/kg, working together by taking pulls. The first iteration did not go as planned. Instead of a break of 3 riders, more like 15 went up the road, and they didn’t exactly stick to our effort limits. That’s the price we pay for not all being on Discord and listening to the instructions, as some seemingly did not see the typed messages either.

Despite the snafu, the first attempt provided a learning point. The group of 15 worked very well together, and even when they reduced the effort, our slightly larger group was unable to pull them back. We didn’t work quite as well together, having a strung-out bunch that could not benefit as much from the draft. We regrouped after exiting Richmond proper, heading out of town for our first climb.

Leading into the climb, we discussed the importance of positioning at the base of a climb. Just like IRL racing, where in the group you start the climb can have a significant impact on where you finish the climb. Heading into Box Hill, we talked about heavier riders or those who struggle on the climbs trying to position themselves towards the front of the group. That way, they can still benefit from the group while drifting back through it during the climb. Ideally, they would end up at the back of the group but still in it at the top of the climb. If they do get gapped, it is a significantly smaller gap than if they started at the back of the group. Likewise, for riders looking to attack or place high in the race, they need to be at the front to ensure that they do not miss any critical moves or can attempt to get a gap without having to ride through a large number of riders. It’s generally a bad tactic to burn a few matches moving from the back to the front of the group, as it means that you will pretty much have to make an attack twice as long as it needed to be. Not the most efficient use of energy. As we made our way up the climb, all trying to ride as close to 2.5 w/kg as possible, the bigger riders drifted back through the lighter riders, and we more or less ended up together.

Approaching our shorter, steeper climb, we talked about how to approach the different types of climbs. On the longer shallower climb, we discussed trading space for time by limiting the gap over the duration of the climb. The shorter, steeper ones, though, require riders to be much more attentive and willing to go to “the dark place” to maintain contact. Yes, losing time or contact on any climb is bad, but staying within yourself on a long climb can keep you from losing huge chunks of time due to an implosion halfway up. However, the punchier climbs aren’t long enough to really cause a massive implosion of the legs if riders have developed a fair ability to suffer. The 23rd Street hill on the Richmond course is a good example of this. Riders who can sustain a higher output for 60 seconds can survive that climb, even if they are bigger riders, whereas Box Hill would destroy them at that same output due to the much longer duration of the climb. This became painfully clear to those who attempted to climb 23rd Street at less than a 3.0 w/kg rate. Huge splits opened up in a very short time. In a race situation, it would be very unlikely that a rider could overcome that gap were the split to happen on the last lap.

On lap two, we went back to our exercises on chasing the break. This time around, we had two very successful iterations. The gaps went out to about 20 seconds, and the pack began the chase. Everyone worked together fairly well, and the breaks were pulled back in short order. In fact, the chase group stayed so tight that we pulled the breaks back much quicker than anticipated. This allowed more time to recover and prepare for a go at our climbs.

For our last time up Box Hill, we limited the duration and frequency of attacks/hard efforts. We did this to show the effect of burning matches on the climb vs riding steady up the climb. Every time a rider exceeded our set level, it could be done for no more than 15 seconds, representing the short attacks that often happen on this type of climb. After the attack, the riders had to ride at a much easier effort for 20 seconds to recover. The recovery was set at a level below our designated steady pace. After the 20 seconds, riders could return to steady pace or attack again. Due to the restricted efforts, some people were able to attack continuously, but we showed that the steady climbers with relatively few attacks were right up there with the constant attackers but with an easier ride.

The last climb was an all-out hammer. However, I put some stipulations on it. As long as the rider could maintain within 1 w/kg of the max effort that he/she hit, they could keep going. The minute the rider fell more than 1 w/kg off of the pace, he/she had to sit up and ride at 2.0 for the remainder of the climb. That simulated what happens when a rider blows up, demonstrating how much time can be lost due to a mis-timed surge or pour dosing of energy. Some were able to hold a hard pace the whole time, while others went out too hard, paying the price.

Overall, it was a good session, and everyone seemed to pick up the key tenets of the class. Look forward to returning to Watopia next week for some Crack the Whip.

Here’s the full ride video: