CTT Winter Zwift TT Series Event 2 - 22nd November 2025

After last week's Zwift time trial which was held on a pretty much pan-flat course, I was hoping for some improvement. Of course I rode last week's event after a week away with limited training and the day after a horrible journey home, which I think one must bear in mind. Also, I muffed the last few km, when I thought I'd finished with a couple of km still to go.

This week's time trial was on a fairly hilly course: Watopia's Triple Twist. 24.3km with about 201m total ascent. I was hoping that the undulations in this route, together with the two climbs might make the riding better resemble riding in real life than last week's route. And overall, I think it did. I still find holding consistent power rather harder in Zwift than on the road.

Anyway, I nipped out to the garage and set up the trainer. I rode the usual warmup, then saved it prior to going to the start pens with just a couple of minutes to go. At this point I thought everything was in order. Unfortunately...my virtual gears weren't working and after a minute or two spinning frantically, I was clearly not going to be able to ride a TT properly and I packed. I knew there was a 4pm re-run of the time trial, so I entered that. 

So, what was the technical problem? Ultimately it's to do with pairing more than one device to the Apple TV, which only offers two bluetooth connections to devices (plus another to the remote control). At the moment, my trainer delivers power, control, speed and cadence via one bluetooth connection, and my Poalr H10 HR sensor via a second. Some months ago, after the Tacx Neo 3M received a system update enabling virtual gears, I bought a Zwift cog, which I'm operating via a pair 

of Play controllers. This was because I sometimes felt the gears auto-shifting under heavy load, which is sufficiently distracting to make Zwift racing a bit difficult. When it works great, it's really a neat solution. Unfortunately that requires two additional bluetooth connections, impossible via Apple TV. The solution is to connect via the Zwift Companion app on my phone. This also works quite reliably except...when pairing the devices, they don't all connect if I have my earbuds connected to the phone. This is why I was lodged in the default gear...by the time I realized what was going on, it was too late to deal with it.

Warming up, riding a Cervelo P5 as in real life!

So at 16:09 I was lined up in the start pens, once again (and after a warmup that saw me ride the course) and raring to go. My impressions were that the more undulating course did help with holding power. At least for the first third of the event, which took me up the first 16 minutes or so (I had a brief freewheel on the descent). After that I was taking quite frequent pauses, but not while climbing the second climb. 

In the end, I finished in 40:51 21st out of 78 riders in Cat C with 224W ave (227W normalised), which equates to 3.5 Wkg^-1. This was a slightly higher average than last week's event, and a much better Cat C placing. This may reflect an improvement.

Next week's event uses three laps of the Fan Flats route in Zwift's Richmond world. As the route name implies, this will be a pretty flat affair. I've entered the Saturday morning event, and Zwift seems to have elevated me to Cat B on the basis of 3.5Wkg^-1!