Today’s race story comes from my first time racing the Team DRAFT Tuesday Race. Held across three laps of Three Village Loop with category enforcement enabled and no powerups, it happened to tick all the boxes for me on this particular morning:
- It was in a good time slot, and just under an hour long
- It featured three goes up a hard climb where I would be challenged to stay in the front pack
- The flat, fast sprint finish suited me
- The number of participants was lower (40ish), which would make interacting with other riders more personal while opening up more strategic opportunities
The Warmup
The race began at 7:30am, so I was on the bike by 6:45 to spin up the legs with Coco. I’d eaten a banana for a quick breakfast, to get some fructose in the veins. And of course, I had chewed two pieces of caffeine gum (200mg of go-go juice!) and applied PR lotion to the legs… my typical race prep.
I put in a few hard, shorter efforts to get the heart rate up and break the ice, then I headed for the start pens on my Tron bike.
The Plan
I haven’t raced Three Village Loop much, but I know the course well enough to know that there’s just one stop where I would have to push at or near my max: the KOM up to the Castle.
Apart from that climb, the route is basically flat or slightly downhill, ending on a high-speed flat sprint.
The climb is around 3.5 minutes from start to finish for a B rider like myself. It’s really a two-part climb, though. The first part – across the bridge and twisting up through the houses – is very draftable, rather short, and generally not very challenging.
Then the road flattens for a bit before you turn left toward the Castle and begin to hammer for the final 1 kilometer. This is where the big efforts come, and when the route follows the road all the way to the KOM banner, I usually get dropped! But the Three Village Loop, mercifully, turns right earlier, keeping the climb short.
I wasn’t sure if I could hang with the front across three laps, but I figured it would be a great workout regardless.
Lap 1
After an easy downhill lead-in to the Country Sprint banner, our first lap began. We had 42 Bs in the race, and everything stayed tame until we hit the bridge that signals the real start of the KOM. (The actual start line comes well before the bridge, but the road is mostly flat from the start line to the bridge.)
I stayed in the wheels up through the first part of the climb and across the flat section in the middle, then steeled myself for the real effort. 376W average for ~100 seconds kept me in touch with the front group of 14. I survived! Now it was time to sit in, recover, and get ready for the next lap’s climb.
There’s a bit of easy uphill after you leave the Castle area, then it’s flat or downhill through the Fishing Village and Village Onsen to the sprint banner. The Castle, the Fishing Village, Village Onsen. Three villages. Get it?
One Belgian rider, Claessens, went off the front as we left the Castle area, but he got reeled in before we passed the start pens 3 km later. A bit later, he attacked after the Country Sprint banner. Was he super strong, just racing for the workout… or something else? We would find out soon enough.
Lap 2
The second lap’s KOM began rather unremarkably, but we caught and dropped Claessens just before beginning the hard final kilometer. He wouldn’t come back.
But the Belgians were out in force today, and one “J. Mertens” attacked hard on the climb, finishing 7 seconds ahead of my pack of 9 survivors.
That second lap’s climb hurt more than the first, but I wasn’t quite at my limit, either. I was starting to feel hopeful that I could hang in on the final lap.
Lap 3 and the Finish
Mertens stayed away, and as we began lap 3 he had ~10 seconds on the peloton. Two riders – M. Chaix and J. Profeta – jumped off the front of the peloton early in the lap and bridged up to Mertens, making it three strong riders up front vs seven chasers. This was getting interesting!
We hit the beginning of the KOM and one “P. Thomsen” attacked, bridging up to the three ahead. Now it was 4 vs 6, with the breakaway 10 seconds up the road heading into the final hard climb.
At the end of the climb Thomsen ran out of steam, dropping back to my group. We were back to 3 vs 7. Could we chase down the leaders? Nobody in my group seemed to have the will/legpower to pull the group back to the breakaway, even though “M. Tremblay” and “Old Andy” put in some decent pulls. For my part, I just couldn’t put out the power to stay on the front of the group in any meaningful way, so I gave up the chase and sat in.
With 1 km to go I congratulated the front three, then prepared myself for the final sprint. With just under 300m to go, Tremblay jumped first, followed immediately by an even harder acceleration from “A. Erikssson”. I reacted a bit slowly (need to put the KICKR back on my rocker plate and enable race mode, I guess!) but held decent power, reaching the line well behind Eriksson but ahead of everyone else in my group.
5th place on screen, 4th place in ZwiftPower.
See activity on Strava >
See results on ZwiftPower >
Watch the Race
Takeaways
4th place on ZwiftPower earned me a result of 182.2, which wasn’t quite good enough to make it into my top 5 recent results and improve my ranking. For that, I would have needed 1st or 2nd.
Should I have followed the two riders who joined the break and stayed away? Perhaps. Looking back on races, I often think things like, “I could have made that jump.” (Do you do the same?) In the moment, though, with tired legs and a high heart rate it seems close to impossible!
Regardless, I always smile when I see a breakaway succeed in a race, even if I’m not in the breakaway, because it just doesn’t happen a lot in Zwift. Looking at the results, though, it’s worth noting that the breakaway rider who “won” this race, M Chaix, averaged 4.2W/kg (328W) for 48 minutes, with no HR and no ZwiftPower account, while the other two breakaway riders averaged just 3.4 and 3.6W/kg.
I don’t mention that to cast aspersions on any of the breakaway riders. The other two in the break had no easy way of knowing if Chaix was legit or not, and in fact, with this being a category enforced race, it would be fair to assume this was a breakout performance for Chaix and he’ll be upgraded to A for future events. So all good there.
I mention it because Chaix doing out-of-category numbers is probably a big reason why the breakaway succeeded. So my rule still holds – that breakaways rarely succeed in Zwift races. When they do, it may just mean there’s someone powering the breakaway who should be in a higher category.
But that sort of stuff just comes with the territory in Zwift racing. You have to learn to live with it, or it’ll drive you crazy. In the end, it was a fun and challenging race, and those willing to attack and take a chance came away with the win. Profeta finished 1st on ZwiftPower, and Mertens 2nd. Chapeau to you both!
Your Thoughts
Have you ever won a Zwift race in a breakaway? Or missed the break and cursed your poor judgment? Share below!
wpDiscuz
