Last week's event was something of a disaster from a technical standpoint. Of the three instances of this event (Wednesday evening, Saturday morning and Saturday afternoon) I entered the Saturday morning event. I was out in the garage in good time for a warmup before heading over to the event. Thirty seconds before I was to start, the system announced I needed to pair an HRM - which is strictly enforced by the organisers. That was odd, because I had one paired. Anyway, I got bounced from the race as I didn't have enough time to re-pair the HRM.
So I entered the 4pm event. And the same thing happened, except both power and HRM apparently got disconnected seconds before the off. I found this mighty frustrating since I'd been looking forward to the rather mountainous course in Innsbruck. But what was going on?
I strongly suspect that the connection between the Zwift Companion and the Apple TV that I use to run Zwift was dropping out. I need the Apple Companion because I'm pairing too many devices for the Apple TV's measly two Bluetooth connections to cope with. I'd also noticed a lag of about 15 second in data in Zwift responding to changes in effort. All things together, I reckon something out there is interfering with my WiFi extension out in the garage - I'm using a powerline connection to provide ethernet to the AppleTV and a WiFi extender, so maybe I'm being a bit ambitious. On the other hand, it has been pretty stable since I set it up.
So in the days prior to the 5th event in the series, I been using my 12.2" iPad Pro (1st generation and running a pretty old version of iOS) to run Zwift, and I had dispensed with the Zwift Companion. Things seemed pretty stable. Once again, I entered the 9am event. This was 19.6km on Tempus Fugit.
I started a warmup ride, but after about 20 minutes my legs felt lousy and I had zero motivation to ride the Tempus Fugit flat course. I didn't start, and instead entered the 4pm event. This one went pretty well, though I almost faltered at the outset! At least all my devices stayed connected.
For the first minute I really felt an (almost) complete lack of motivation and practically packed. But sense took hold and I pressed on. I took the strategy of trying to replicate the kind of effort I put in IRL - relatively low cadence and high gear, keeping an eye on the power. I was aiming to see an improvement in average power.
Heading back through the town with just over 4km to go
Once I buckled down to it, I did reasonably well, with an average power of 240W (normalised power 244W), giving a result of 30:47. I placed near the bottom of Cat B, but not actually at the bottom. So I was pretty glad I persisted, though with some regrets about that opening minute!
The four events I've ridden in this series fit into a general pattern of increasing average power that I've seen in VTTA Zwift TTs in 2024 and 2025, so with more events after Christmas and, I presume, the VTTA events through January and February I should end up in reasonable shape for my traditional season opener, the Port Talbot Wheelers 2-up '25' in early March. Here's hoping.