Back on August 30th I completed the first ride of Zwift Academy Road 2021 – the Baseline Ride. Many thousands of riders around the world did the same, then we dove into the ZA Road program – 6 workouts and 2 recovery rides – before arriving at the Finish Line ride.
Today was my day for the Finish Line effort, after taking it easy yesterday to recover from the prior day’s big ZRL race. I woke up early, joined the Twenty24 Road to Tokyo group ride for a warmup, then headed to the start pens. It was still dark outside, but I had 200mg of Military Energy Gum caffeine coursing through my veins and PR lotion on the legs, so I was ready to rock.
Before I Tell My Story… Tell Me Yours
If you finished ZA Road 2021, please take a minute to fill out this short survey. It only takes about 1 minute to share how your Baseline Ride compared to your Finish Line Ride.
The results will be used in an upcoming Zwift Insider post, and they’ll be shared with ZHQ as well.
My Baseline Bests
As we spun our way easy out of the start pen I checked the times and power averages I had set in my Baseline Ride:
- VO2 Effort (Titans Grove KOM Reverse): 1:45, 466W average
- Sprint Effort (Watopia Sprint): 24.23 seconds, 692W average
- Threshold Effort (Volcano KOM): 8:07, 333W average
Knowing those power numbers would give me some rough targets, plus knowing the length of each interval would help me with pacing.
[adinserter block=”1″]
Segment 1: Titans Grove KOM
Yesterday I set up a new rocker plate to test/review, and to be honest, the out of the saddle experience wasn’t what I was used to. So I planned to do most of my efforts seated, because I really liked the seated feel with this plate.
As I approached the start banner (very easy to see now that Zwift added big ZA arches at the start lines) I ramped up the watts, then just pushed harder as the road tilted upward. Knowing I had averaged 466W in my first attempt, I was watching my numbers and trying to make sure my power didn’t drop below that number. I was surprised to see my wattage staying near 500W. Could I hold this power?
The suffering really set in during the final 30 seconds. And with 10 seconds to go I was on the very limit, with my legs about to explode. But I kept pushing, giving it all I had – and took the KOM when I crossed the line. Hurray!
1:38, 515W average (10.5% power increase)
Segment 2: Watopia Sprint Forward
I wasn’t sure if I had just dug deeper in the first segment, or if my legs weren’t very recovered today – but after the feeling of those final seconds of the Titans Grove KOM, I wasn’t sure what I would have left on the other segments. But I wasn’t going to give up! So I rode super easy as we made our way down the hill toward the sprint segment.
At this point I was joined by another rider, Ricardo from the Coalition team, who hung with me as we made our way to the Italian Village. He congratulated me on grabbing the KOM (Ricardo had placed third).
As we hit the cobbles of the Italian Village I ramped up my wattage so I would hit the start line at a high speed. Then it was a head-down, all-out high cadence seated sprint to the line. Looking up at the leaderboard as I crossed the line, it had me in 1st place. Woohoo!
But victory is fleeting. Just a fraction of a second later I got bumped to second place as Ricardo flew across the line, besting my time of 23.36 with his time of 22.8!
Nice work, Ricardo. And I had improved on my Baseline time, which was all that mattered to me.
23.36 seconds, 755W average (9.1% power increase)
Segment 3: Volcano KOM
It seemed as though my legs were strong today, even though I felt like I lacked the stamina for a full-strength effort up the Volcano KOM. I spun super easy, making my way to the Volcano, chatting with Ricardo over The Esses.
I always dread the Volcano KOM, because it’s 8 minutes of pain and I’ve never felt victorious here in races – I always get dropped! But I had a target: 340W+. And my big goal was to finish in under 8 minutes.
Once again I ramped up the watts heading into the start, then tried to keep the effort steady, remaining seated. When the road got steeper I would try to increase my wattage, then I would ease a bit for microrecovery on the downhills and flats. Ricardo was sitting on my wheel, never more than 1 second behind.
I wasn’t sure if he was struggling to keep up with me, or just sitting on my wheel and biding his time. But seeing him just behind helped me keep the pressure on the pedals. I envisioned him pushing hard to pass me, and I kept trying to keep my effort high so he couldn’t do it.
We hit the flat section halfway up the climb and I was suffering, but not dead yet. So I kept hammering! Then with 400m to go the road tilted up even more, and that’s when Ricardo put the hammer down, coming around me at over 8w/kg and dropping me like a hot rock. I pushed with all I had in those final seconds, crossing the line in 3rd overall. Ricardo was in 2nd!
7:51, 349W average (4.8% power increase)
Watch the Ride Recording
I edited the video so it just shows the start plus each of the three segments. Enjoy the silent suffercam footage!
Wrapping Up Zwift Academy Road 2021
This year’s Zwift Academy Road was a fun experience for me. The workouts were challenging, but doing them in a group setting pushed me so I never gave up or even touched my FTP bias setting. And the results of my Finish Line ride were pleasantly surprising! I had hoped to improve on at least one of the segments, but improving significantly on all three gives me a big morale boost.
Did I improve because I got stronger during Zwift Academy? Or were my improvements due to other reasons? Hard to say exactly, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that for many of us, a second attempt on the same course will yield a better result just because we’re more familiar with each segment and our abilities. Still, I feel like I attacked the segments quite well in my Baseline Ride, so I’m confident that at least some of my improvement is due to increased fitness.
What will Zwift do next for ZA Road finishers? They’ve promised an email to finishers talking about next steps based on your Finish Line results. Will they help me determine my strengths and weaknesses? Give me training tips based on my results?
Like I said in my Baseline Ride article, the Baseline/Finish Line rides idea is a good one. But it has a lot of untapped potential in terms of better metrics (e.g., showing riders their average power for the segments) and personalized training advice (e.g., “VO2 power is your biggest weakness, here’s how to train it.”) I think we’ll see it in coming seasons.
Your Thoughts
How did your Finish Line ride go? Share below, and don’t forget to complete our short survey!
My Finish Line ride really shocked me. I thought that I would be pretty close to what I did the first time. I had watched your Baseline Ride video the night before that ride. But I gave myself every available advantage for the Finish Line ride. I had gotten up early, I got enough sleep, I had taken an easy day the day before, I was ready. Honestly I was shocked by my Finish Line ride results. Titans Grove I was 20 seconds faster, the sprint 3 seconds faster, but the shocker was the Volcano Climb at 20 MINUTES faster. I credit that to all the spinning I had to do during the academy workouts because my legs got so used to doing it and I was better able to do that climb. I’m very happy with the academy this year. I just wish they would have made the recovery rides clearer like Baseline ride, Recovery ride One, Recovery ride 2 and Finish Line ride. Other than that I think they did a great job.
Congrats on the big improvements, Linda!
I don’t understand how you got 20 MINUTES faster on the Volcano, though. I’ve seen some of your ride videos – you’re no slouch rider. How the heck did it take you that much time your first time? Did you stop and take a nap? 😂
Must mean 2 minutes faster. Volcano is a pretty short climb.
I think the Volcano improvement was 5 minutes, going from 89w average to 113w average. A great improvement Linda.
I went back to check my results but they’ve disappeared from the companion app for some reason. Maybe it’s only kept for a few weeks. I found the data a bit of an anticlimax if I’m honest. Overall I enjoyed ZA but thought I’d get more tailored information other than simply seeing my times, which I can do myself anyway checking my Strava PRs.
This years ZA had so much potential but somehow it just didn’t quite get there IMHO. The point of any of these “Academy’s” is to teach the participants how to train. For those of us who have been doing “Fitness” for years (or decades) there isn’t much teaching going on but we can always learn something. Here’s where I felt it fell short:
Hope they can do better next time around. This was better than last year for sure; it was just the unrealized potential that bugs me…
I think you’re being a little hard saying there was no instruction on the baseline ride. It was explained in the details to ZA on the website etc. The people in the pens with no idea were the ones who didn’t go and read up on what it was all about, which isn’t really Zwift’s fault. However I do agree that there should have been more ‘obvious’ information for people, and the lack of banners etc showing where the sections were was a huge error. Agree with your other points though, it had the makings of a great ZA, but the short comings were a shame.
Instructions right at the beginning reminding people of the goals (cruising in between and that there was no draft) would have been helpful.
I wasn’t a fan of the recovery ride. The first one was fine (except everyone wanted to race up the KoM – which is fine, I did too), but there wasn’t much guidance on the point or suggested effort or anything. There was a zwift representative there but they only clarified that the first recovery ride and 2nd were 2 different things and you could just do #1 twice to get credit for both.
The 2nd recovery ride was outright annoying. The ride leader said that there was going to be a strict power limit that they were going to stick to and wouldn’t change and wanted everyone to stay near the banner (fine, but just do a rubber-banded workout then if that’s your goal). The thing was, the ride leader said that the coaches had wanted it to be set at 1.7 W/kg so that’s what we were going to do, but the ride leader then ended up averaging 2.1 W/kg for the ride. No big deal, but don’t go on about how you’re going to strictly follow an expected W/kg and then ignore it. Either tell us what you’re actually going to do and then do it or just explain the goals of the ride (staying in Z2/3 or the gray and blues or whatever) and then say “I’m going to ride about here and you’re welcome to join me”. And they they spend the whole ride chatting over the screen and doing a trivia game and generally just covering the screen with text. Those 2 problems (ignoring set speeds and stupid chat from ride leaders covering the middle of the screen constantly is why I don’t do group rides. I know that there are some people who like that, but that’s not my style, especially since I was using that ride as a route recon for this week’s ZRL race on the same course. Had I known in advance, I probably would have chosen a different session of it, but it was one that fit into my schedule and I needed the route recon, so I just stuck with it and was annoyed the whole time.
Hi Eric, first of all thanks for the good vibes today at Watopia. It felt like a unique coincidence to meet you there, as ZI is a daily website for me and I am a huge Zwift fan. Secondly, I must admit that I am really honored to be mentioned in the article above. I have already received many messages from my brilliant COALITION teammates who found and read the article before me.
When I saw you , I had the idea to offer you a little contest for the sprint. If I won, you would join the COALITION team, but honestly after the Titan Grove KOM, my brain had no idea to offer you anything. After the sprint, I felt like I missed an opportunity. Still, I can offer you a Canyon sticker AND a handmade COALITION sticker from one of our members.
So Eric, you’ll find a happy place with lots of fun, talkative, Zwift-addicted friends. Learn from me and don’t miss the opportunity… Here is the link to join our Discord server:
https://discord.gg/coalition
If you need more inspiration you can have alook at this IG: CANYON ESPORTS TEAM (@canyon_esports) • Instagram-Fotos und -Videos
Thanks Eric 🙂
Titans grove – 1:56 to 1:48
Sprint – 27 to 27 (didnt really go all out on either)
volcano – 8:32 to 8:20
78kg
Baseline ride i was on a great day. legs felt great. Finish line ride…did not feel nearly as good. effort was the same. sensations werent great. but still bettered my times and i think i could faster if i was on a better day.
I experienced similar decent gains across all three segments. I don’t think my fitness has improved much, if at all, over the six weeks, but I have definitely benefitted from knowing how long I can sustain a hard effort. It helps to know what’s coming of course, so that you can moderate your effort, but knowing you are capable of riding at or above FTP for extended periods of time meant I was able to push much harder on the finish line ride.
I like the structures of having different styles of workouts, but I sometimes am amused by the intro statements about how “this workout is going to totally transform your ability to do ______” as if one workout done once (or a series of workouts where you only do one a week without changing anything) is going to magically change your abilities. Sure, if you have no structure, any structure helps, and learning new types of training are helpful to find things to incorporate into your routine, but just doing something once without coming back to it multiple times seems unlikely to be a huge difference maker.
Cool, I was in the same baseline ride as you. I remember you talking about testing the rocker 😎. It was my 2nd attempt which was far better.
Titans Grove: 2:50 to 2:40 (219W to 233W avg)
Sprint: 27s for both (486W/645W to 534W/624W avg/peak, but did a better run-up on the baseline ride)
Volcano Climb: 11:52 to 11:09 (176W to 187W avg). I let my power drop much more on the flats and downhills during the Volcano on the finish line ride so I had more left for the final kick, and I think that was part of it.
The overall ride was almost exactly the same time for both, so I don’t expect that better recovery was a significant part of the improvement.
I was happy with my progress, but to be fair I’ve only been riding for 5 months so I would have been very surprised if there wasn’t a decent improvement. I did read the full ZA description and watched Eric’s video of the baseline ride, and took notes on distance markers and lengths before I attempted it, so I was prepared for the first ride.
I was disappointed by the data provided by Zwift though, I had to get those power numbers from Strava.
We really need the timer and estimated finish time to hit our best potential. I did both pro and shorter finish rides. My times were very similar. I really did a do or die effort on Titan at 1:31.0 at 484 watts, 22.79 at 685 watts and Volcano 7:41.2 at 301 watts. I peaked at the right time this Academy. Now What’s next?
I found the sessions motivating to do, but it’s deeply missing a conclusion. Yes, I can compare the times and powers (just about), better through Strava, but with all the dialogue on rider pheonotype in the tutorials and reports… why isn’t that part of the analysis?
The dialogue even talks around “if you are a rider of this type…” well, yes I have views on strengths/weaknesses but isn’t that one of the best capabilities of this academy – to collate for the first time real personal AND community data, indoors, competing to the same frames of reference in terms of segments, training techniques, consistent environmental without drafting or powerups?
Is it about personal performance improvement – yes of course. But community percentile performance, or personalised bias analysis against anonymous crowd data seems a big oversight. Basic automated data-analysis could probably even use HR data to strip out ‘ride-through’ vs full-gas attempts for greater comparability.
Any word on when we can expect the “promised… email to finishers talking about next steps based on your Finish Line results”?
world of Zwift mentioned it a while ago but I still haven’t seen anything
I got mine yesterday, as did others. Maybe check your spam folders?