Had a funeral to attend today so no commute. I worked from home for a couple of hours PM. I was tired. My body was saying have a rest, have a beer but my head was making me want to ride to earn the damn beer!
Knowing myself quite well I expected to have tired legs still after Sunday’s mini-epic so I decided to just do a ‘ride’ on Zwift.
I chose the AHDR Bacon Rolls with Caffeine ride and had no idea what the title meant. Warming up in then pen with 200+ others we were advised it was a 3 lapper of the Greater London Flat course. Two laps bunched with an optional race lap to finish or ‘caffeine lap’. The only rules were you had to start behind the yellow beacon to qualify for the race. Easy then.
This was my first group ride using the fence feature
The pace of the first 2 laps was decent. 2.5-3.0w/kg suited me perfectly and it was enough to confirm my legs were still tired from Sunday. The group held together really well and the fence feature was great to slow the front when things got a bit stretched. There was plenty of banter flying around amongst the regulars. It was a nice change to balls out racing.
The fence is a control the ride leader has. If you go beyond it for more than a minute you can get booted off the ride
With the race or caffeine lap approaching we got to choose race or pace. Those that didn’t want to race held back and continued to ride tempo with the red beacon while us lot kicked off the last lap full gas. My graph went straight into the red and my legs complained. I kept surging as if doing intervals to try and ride the group. I counted the mins down and as the group came out of the tunnel and the fastest broke away I eased and began to roll in and warm down. Through the finish I warmed down and ticked of a healthy 60min group ride which was harder than I expected.
Great fun. I’ll look out for that one again.
The Bacon Rolls rides are great. Good pace and well led. It’s on at 5:50am here so it’s slightly hard on my sleepy morning legs though!