Stats first because everyone loves a good statistic or two, last month I managed a total of 372.20km, of which 295.91km was outdoors and for the second month running this was all on road and mostly on the Sabbath. The remaining 76.29 km were racked up going nowhere fast sweating like an overheated pisshead in Benidorm riding my Zwift Ride in our back room.

Now I realise that the thought of wasting our precious all too short UK summer riding indoors on a trainer is going to be personally triggering or a lot of people but bear with me there were a couple of mitigating factors. The first was the weather, the start of June was certainly not the ‘Flaming June’ of popular British folklore, it was wet, pretty cold and miserable some days, and as I have mentioned in the past I’m really not a fan of road riding in the rain. You can call me all the names you want but I’m still not going top do it unless I absolutely have to. (so there 😝)

The second factor was some unfortunate medical issues for a member of our close family which although now are happily mostly resolved did take up quite a lot of our attention over the last few weeks and quite rightly pushed riding bikes down the priority list for awhile. Luckily when your free time compresses and the weather gods are also not smiling down on you Zwift can provide a very effective fast workout to keep the legs turning and the lungs open. Now looking online for some fast high intensity pain can I imagine lead you to some very unsavoury corners of the internet, but if you’re looking for maximum heart rate and lactic acid fuel pain fest that lasts around 35 minutes on a indoor bike then I don’t think you can beat a Zwift Crit race.

I entered four races last month, they were all around the 20km distance mark, took about 30 – 35 minutes to complete and all of them left me absolutely shattered. Now I hadn’t raced on Zwift for awhile and I’m still getting to grips with the new way Zwift categorises people into races with what it calls your Zwift ‘racing score’, so in the first couple of Crits I was one of the lower ranked riders in my race and lets just say it was a painful experience. I got my backside comprehensively handed to me after trying to hang onto the front group in both races and then blowing up spectacularly and grovelling to the finish miles behind the leaders. The second two races went better mainly because my already mediocre racing score had dropped even further thanks to the relatively poor results in the first two races. This allowed me to enter a slightly different race category in which instead of being one of the weakest riders I’d be much further up the virtual field. In the next race I managed to stay with the lead group and finished 4th just off the podium, and in the last race I found myself dragging the lead group up the virtual Box Hill climb outside London in pursuit of a lone rider who had broken clear before the climb. After I caught him at the top of the hill we managed to stay away for the last few Km’s to the finish were He of course out sprinted me, but hey 2nd was still a much better result than I was expecting, and being the one driving the pace at the front of the race for once was certainly a different experience for me! Of course these better results have pushed my racing score back up again so I’ll now be firmly back at the tail end of the next races I enter but that’s progress I suppose……..

So as we move into July I’m determined to get some off road miles in (in fact as I write this a few days into the month I’ve already managed his goal) but more about that next month.