Last week Zwift HQ’s James Bailey and I hosted the first-ever Thursday Pizza Burner, a new weekly 100-kilometer ride. Lots of riders showed up and put in solid endurance efforts, so I wanted to write up a ride review to share the experience in case you missed it but want to hop in on future weeks. Read on!
Ride Intro
“The Thursday Pizza Burner 🔥🍕 with James and Eric” is a 100-kilometer multi-paced ride happening each Thursday at 1:05pm UTC/8:05am ET/5:05am PT.
I say “multi-paced” because James and I both have yellow leader beacons, but he targets a pace of 1.8 w/kg while I target 2.5 w/kg. You are free to ride with either of us. You can even be somewhere in between, off the back, or (worst of all) a Zinner off the front winning the group ride. ☺️
Sign up for the next Pizza Burner ride (Jan 16) >
Watch My Video
Want to see how the first Pizza Burner unfolded from my perspective? Here’s my recording, complete with Discord chatter:
Play By Play
We left the pens with 164 riders grouped up. Thanks to late joiners (you can join any group ride up to 30 minutes into the event) a total of 180 riders would eventually participate. Our goal? 25 Volcano Circuit laps for a total of 105.3km.
We stayed together for the first Volcano Circuit lap, getting our legs warmed up, inviting folks to join the Discord voice chat, and generally getting everyone on the same page. Once we began the second lap, I ramped up my pace to the target 2.5 w/kg, and my group split off from James’.
Soon enough the name-calling began. Well, the positive name-calling, that is. James started it when he messaged, “The ‘best group’ is currently around position 124” 38 minutes into the ride.
I couldn’t let that go unanswered, so I explained that the “more best” group was at 24.6km. James quickly countered by “calling besterest x infinity.” This, I sense, may turn into a repeated ride theme…
The Coffee Stop is a controversial feature in Zwift, but James set the tone early on by explaining that he would be taking any and all coffee stops available. He was true to his word, announcing “COFFEE SHOP OPEN” just past the 30-minute mark. Soon enough, the cups were flying:
This, too, will surely turn into a theme on the Pizza Burner ride. Perhaps we should have named the ride something like “James’ Coffee Stop Metric”.
Discord filled up nicely (we used Zwift Insider’s server, available at discord.gg/zwiftinsider) and you can hear that chatter in my video above. It was great to have Justin “Wagz” Wagner join us, because he was, in many ways, the inspiration behind this ride! I rode in Justin’s 3-hour “Wagner’s Wagon” Thursday morning rides which he hosted weekly for years, and always appreciated how his witty banter on Discord made the time pass.
(Justin didn’t finish this ride, but we were all able to tease him enough so he held on past his initial 60km target and went to 64+ instead. He’ll be back…)
One rider, “10 96 Cycling”, made things hilarious and confusing by listening in on Discord but only replying to voice chat via in-game messages. (He said his mic wasn’t working, but I think he just enjoyed being an agent of chaos.)
At the top of the hour we held an impromptu dad joke competition: tell your joke, and everyone else replies with a 1-10 rating. I started it off:
10 meant the joke was good, but as Wagz pointed out near the end of the competition, these were dad jokes, which meant, perhaps, that the lowest-rated jokes were actually the real winners.
Ross Irwin gets an honorable mention for his repeated requests to hear top-secret Zwifty info from James and I. (We shared a few tidbits, but nothing that would get James fired.) Keep digging, Ross. Hopefully in future weeks we’ll have more to share!
As the kilometers ticked over, my front group of ~70 shrunk to 60, then 50, then 40. Pretty standard for long rides on Zwift. Some folks sign on knowing they have to pull the plug at two hours. Others just want to see how far they can ride. Other had to ease up and finish at a slower pace. It’s all good. These rides can turn into a mental battle, but that’s one of the beautiful things about longer bike rides – they train your mental muscle!
Heading into the penultimate lap, I asked my group if they were up for a challenge. Could we work together, using powerups wisely, to make our 25th and final lap our fastest on the day? We decided we’d shoot for a sub-6-minute pace, since all of our laps had been over 6 minutes. There was some groaning, but eventually it felt like everyone got on board, especially after I agreed to do an extra slow 24th lap!
We all saved our aero powerups:
Then went for it as the final lap began. We were supposed to target 300 watts on the front, but I think things got a bit spicier than that. At some point, a group of riders broke away from my pack. I and others in my group put in a couple of digs, but we weren’t quite able to pull them back. No matter, though – my final lap time was 5 minutes, 50.8 seconds, and I was happy with that.
Final Numbers
According to the event results, 66 riders went on to complete the full 25-lap ride (105.3km). I finished my ride in 2h43 with an average wattage of 207 (so 2.46 w/kg), while James and his group finished in 3h08. James averaged 162 watts (bang on 1.8 w/kg)… and used 5 coffee stops.
Pizza Socks!
This is the Pizza Burner, after all, so finishers unlock the coveted Pizza Socks, which have only been unlocked through a handful of Zwift events in the past. Congrats to all the new Pizza Sock owners.
Join Us!
You may not want to ride a long Thursday Pizza Burner, but don’t let that stop you. (James doesn’t want to do it, either, and he’s leading it!) Misery loves company:
This week’s ride is 100km long, on Watopia’s Waistband. No big head avatars this week, but we will be riding Big Wheels!
wpDiscuz
