How the Race Was Lost: Pairing Malfunctions and Burrito Surprises on Country to Coastal

This week my team (Coalition Delusion, racing in the ZRL B1 Development Lime division), took on 8 others in the only scratch race of Round 1. Having raced the course before, I knew it would push me to the limit with its three climbs.

Could I hang on to the front group so I could contest the finish? Only one way to find out…

Planning, Warmup, and Man Flu

As usual, my team was on Discord chatting about the race in the days leading up to the big throwdown. This one was pretty straightforward: a scratch race with three climby bits and a short uphill finish. Each rider’s goal was simply to survive the climbs in the front group, and regardless of whether that happened or not, to finish as high as possible from whatever group we were in at the end.

I got on the bike with plenty of time before the 10am PT race, giving me a full half hour to wake up the ol’ ticker and spin up the legs so I could be ready for what was sure to be a hard start. I was already one dirty chai and a few pieces of Neuro caffeine gum into my warmup by the time I got on the bike, so I was nicely caffeinated. I had also rubbed PR Lotion into my legs to keep the burning at bay.

My Warmup “Stack”

There was just one hitch in my raceday plans: I was getting sick. The night before, I’d noticed a sore throat, then the morning of the race I woke up with that flu feeling. You know the one, where your arm hair is sore to the touch? I felt a bit feverish and generally sore, but I could tell it hadn’t hit me fully, and I didn’t want to make my team scramble for a sub at the last minute. So I soldiered on, hoping t wouldn’t affect me too much.

A Sketchy Start

I almost lost the race before it even began.

I was running an odd trainer/power meter setup, because I’m still testing the Wahoo KICKR Core 2. I had noticed it was reading extra low recently (3% or so below my Assioma pedals), so I decided I would pair the Assiomas as my power source, but also pair the Core 2 as resistance and cadence so I could use virtual shifting.

That would have worked fine – except I decided to dual record it by booting up a Zwift session on another PC and connecting my test account to it, pairing the Core 2 as power source so I could record the Core 2’s data.

I could have sworn this had worked fine the week before. And it seemed to work fine during my warmup (although looking at my video below, it actually wasn’t working there either. I just hadn’t noticed.)

I didn’t notice the problem until 2 minutes before the race started. Here’s the full play-by-play, pieced together by watching my race video.

• -2:00: Re-pair trainer as Resistance and Cadence. Virtual gearing shows again on HUD.
• -1:28: Virtual gearing disappears. But I don’t even notice, because I’m faffing around changing my virtual socks. Seriously.
• -0:16: I finally notice virtual gearing is gone, and bring up the pairing screen again to re-pair. (I also grab my other keyboard and close the Zwift session I have going with my test account, assuming this is causing the issue. No dual recording today!)
• 0:00: The race begins, and I’m thinking I’ve fixed things just in time.
• 0:05: I quickly realize the game has me in gear 15, but I can’t change gears using either my Zwift Play or Click v2 controllers, both of which show up as paired.
• 0:25: As the pack hits the opening climb hard, I’m pedaling about as fast as I can (although RPM shows 67-68 on the HUD, oddly, while showing 0 rpm from the Core 2 on the pairing screen). I pull up the pairing screen again to confirm everything looks right. It does.
• 0:33: Everyone gets a surprise burrito powerup… the first of several on the day (more on that below). The burritos begin flying within seconds. This is an unwelcome addition to my race.
• 0:45: My virtual gear disappears from the HUD. I trigger my burrito from my Play controller, (which apparently can trigger powerups but not gear changes).
• 0:50: Pull up the pairing screen again. Core 2 is not paired. Pair it again. Back to gear 15.
• 1:07: I pull up the pairing screen again and unpair all the Play and Click controllers, re-pairing them. That’ll fix it, right?
• 1:20: It didn’t fix it. In fact, my virtual gearing has disappeared again. I hit “A” on my keyboard once more to enter the pairing screen, which shows the Core 2 not paired once again. I pair it again.
• 1:27: No dice. Still no virtual shifting showing. I’m in 39th place, sitting in the back of the front pack. Pedaling like mad. Keeping silent on Discord, though, because there’s nothing my teammates can do to help. Gotta get this sorted.
• 1:39: Bring up the pairing screen again to double-check what I have connected. It’s all correct. But I disconnect and re-pair the Core 2 as resistance yet again, for good measure.
• 2:04: I decide to use my bike’s mechanical shifting to drop a couple of gears (I’m currently using a cassette, not the Zwift Cog). This should work until I’m on an easier section where I can maybe get virtual shifting working again.
• 2:49: In a stroke of genius, I decide to power cycle the Core 2. Then quickly realize I may have made a terrible mistake, as all trainer resistance goes away, and I’m forced to pedal at max cadence. I also get a warning popup on my screen: “Heads up! You currently don’t have a smart trainer paired. Pair a Zwift Ready trainer to enable virtual shifting.” Thanks, Zwift.
• 3:05: I mechanically shift to my hardest gear, to give myself a bit more resistance to push against until the trainer comes back online. I naively hope that the trainer will automatically re-pair, and virtual shifting will be restored. (This doesn’t happen.)
• 3:12: Bring up the pairing screen once more. Pair the trainer as resistance.
• 3:21: My virtual gearing pops up: and I’m in gear 24. The hardest. Possible. Gear. It’s like an instant spiral of death, and I stand up and hammer as I quickly shift down using my Play controllers.
• 3:35: I get down to gear 14 and a comfortable cadence. So far I’ve averaged 383 watts in the race.
• 3:55: The Core 2/Zwift recalibrates my gear ratio and resistance drops noticeably. My cadence jumps up to compensate, and I shift to a harder gear. I’m still in the front group. We’re ready to race!

Once my trainer/gearing were straightened out, we were essentially on the long descent/flat to Urukazi. So I sat in and conserved as much as possible, knowing there was hard work up the road.

Surprise Burritos

I’m 100% sure the burrito is the most hated powerup on Zwift. And I’m also sure the only thing worse than getting burritoed when you expect it is getting burritoed by surprise.

Due to some sort of configuration error, our race (and I assume many others’) awarded everyone burritos at unexpected locations. We got one just before riding through the virtual start/finish arch for the first time. Then again just before passing the Mech Isle start pens (near the location of virtual start/finish arches for other routes, I believe). One of our riders said they got a second one not long after (I can’t confirm since I hadn’t used the one I had). And watching my video replay, I discovered there was another awarded 80 meters from the finish line, just after the planned one at the lap arch!

All of these extra burritos had the effect of making the race harder. And in fact, they may have been what ultimately dropped me from the front pack.

Dropped

After our long descent and flat, we hit the next key climb on the route: the corkscrew climb up to the Shisa Sprint.

I fought back to a decent position near the back of the front group with just a few hundred meters left, despite a dangling burrito taking away the group draft that would have otherwise sucked me into the front group.

But just as I got in touch with that group, two more burritos were activated. That front group began to pull away, and a gap opened up.

In the heat of the race, close to my limit at the top of the climb, I didn’t notice this was happening. I saw the pack stretching, but figured it would come back together on the flat and descent that would follow. So as we finished the climb and picked up speed heading into the Shisa Sprint, I sat in my pack of ~8 riders that was dangling off the end of a messy line.

Sauce was still showing all of us together as a front group of 21. But the situation on screen was very different. As we went through the Shisa Sprint, the riders ahead coalesced into two groups. I was in the third with teammate Fabian, and we were 5 seconds behind the middle group which was pushing to rejoin the front.

This is where we should have pushed to rejoin. But we didn’t. I didn’t. And that middle group soon joined the front group, which quickly rode away from us along with any hope of a top finish.

The Finish

We had only Chris F in the front group of 15, which didn’t bode well for us. Fabian and I were in the chase group, and the rest of the team was behind. Based purely on these numbers, I knew that a team win wasn’t probable today. But all we could do was finish as high as possible.

The rest of the race was rather unremarkable from my vantage point, apart from the final sprint. Fabian and I came into the finish in a group of 7, with feather powerups. I decided I would use the feather as I went through the lap banner, then use the burrito if it seemed like it might help.

I ramped up the power and activated the feather as we went through the arch with ~450 meters to go, and quickly found myself on the front of the group with Wegert (a strong rider from VGG) chasing. I thought I had timed it perfectly, activating my burrito as soon as the feather ran out so Wegert would lose any drafting advantage. I even eased a bit, figuring I wanted to keep Wegert under the power of my burrito.

But I didn’t see LM from the ART team flying up behind me in a perfectly-timed feather-powered effort. And with 50 meters to go, he flew past. I finished 16th on the day.

See my ride on Strava >

Watch the Video

Takeaways

When the dust settled, my team came in 2nd on the day behind Atom Racing Team (ART). Well done, ART!

Teammate Chris Fockenberg was our top finisher, coming in 8th. Our team’s newest member, Fabian Streit, finished in 20th (3rd best on the team) – nicely done.

We lost to ART by only 4 points. Such a narrow margin! If two of our riders had just finished 2-3 places higher, we could have taken the win. But hindsight is 20/20.

The good news is, we still sit squarely in 1st for Round 1, with just one race left:

Watching my video and thinking through the race, there were definitely mistakes made on my part. With the benefit of hindsight, here’s what I would do differently:

1. Avoid all the trainer malfunction silliness by paying attention during my warmup. This would have taken some early stress out of the race.
2. Push harder to be near the front on the climb to the Shisa Sprint, to avoid some of those draft-stealing burritos.
3. Push to close the gap to the next group on the descent that followed. (I think I could have managed it, although it would have been tough.)

That said, there was a tiny silver lining to the trainer issues I had at the start. Teammate Chris, our strongest rider on the day, told me this after he learned how the first few minutes of my race went:

“What a first few minutes you had! Those trainer issues and the massive gear 24 resistance you faced 🫣. In a way you helped me out, because I was hurting like hell going up there and noticed that you were behind me towards the top of the climb and over the climb. As you’re one of our stronger riders, in my head I thought, “Ah well if Eric is ok to sit near the back of the pack then maybe I shouldn’t worry too much,” and thus stopped panicking and didn’t destroy myself to get near the front. So, thanks I guess to your trainer? 🤣 Great job working through all that though whilst trying to re-pair everything!”

To be clear, I wouldn’t call what happened a malfunction of the Core 2, or even Zwift. I’m sure it was caused by my having the Core 2 paired to two simultaneous Zwift sessions, which is not exactly an approved use case.

Coalition Delusion finished our race with the traditional Discord team pic:

Your Thoughts

How did race #3 go for you? Did you receive some surprise burritos, and did they impact your race? Share below!