Hate Route Watopia, Smart Trainer Meltdown and Alp PB!!

Quite a bit of activity since my last post, which was too long ago. Work has ramped up and I simply have not been able to dedicate the time to write here - feeble excuse! 

 So last post was about finishing the WGT league in a decent position. Happy with that and the spring/summer WGT has now kicked in for a fresh challenge - more on this later. The weekend of 26 - 28 Feb 21 was the Haute Rout Watopia event on Zwift. Of course, I was up for this.

I had completed the Haute Route Ventoux last September and the 3 consecutive day format was really challenging if going hard for a GC result. This event was the same - really hard! I was a solid B Cat in Zwift and quite competitive in all 3 races. The first race went ok and I was top 10. The next day, my legs knew that I had gone hard and I had a torrid time as the last climb progressed. I still managed to grab a top 8 finish in my race iteration. The GC was based on accumulated time over the 3 stages. There were thousands of participants and I had no idea what my overall position was.

The last stage finished up the Alp Du Zwift and I was certainly fatigued. But better than the day before and it was a controlled ride to exhaustion! My time for the Alp itself was 51 min. Compare that to my Alp PB of 46:29 and you can see the fatigue in the legs.

Anyway, overall in the B Cat I was 43rd. Really happy with that result

After a couple of days rest i felt like I had some accelerated recover and adaptation from the intensity of the Haute Route. So I entered an Alp race to see if I could bag a PB. Success! A new time of 45:33. I actually got DQ'd from the race for exceeding B Cat power. So that's me now an A Cat - small fish in a big pond of power monsters!

BOOM!!!

Not happy with what happened next. My Tacx Neo Smart Trainer had a meltdown. I won't go into details but the trainer was useless and had to be returned to Garmin for warranty replacement. Turns out that there seems to be a generic fault with loads of Neos out in turboland. The forums are full of unhappy riders.

So now I await the replacement from Garmin. Being without a turbo was too traumatic for me - sounds dramatic huh?!! Not happy with the fragility of the Neo, I ventured into the world of Wahoo! More on that next post.