Light rain this morning meant a perfect time to ride stage 4 of the Tour of Watopia. Thankfully rain in Zwift is not wet. I waited until watching the Volta Ciclista a Catalunya on GCN+ to pick a starting time. Group B rode 3 laps plus the lead-in on the recently released Handful of Gravel route. I started at 12:02 PM riding my Blue Norcross AL bike connected to the Wahoo Kickr Snap smart trainer. The bike was auto selected for the ride using a gravel bike but seems to retain the color from my road bike I last used. Before the ride started I think I made a mistake ramping up my watts over 200 because when the ride started the pedaling effort was much harder than my last Zwift ride. That may have been a spin up and spin down to calibrate the smart trainer. Livestream video buffered a lot cutting off the finish. The edited video above has the finish.

The route went up a not so steep but long climb 3 times over the 14.07 miles. The actual climbing for me was 797 feet compared to the 799 feet listed in the companion app event description. Close enough. The descents didn’t ease up much on my pedaling effort but I did hit speeds over 30 mph. Since this was a new route I never rode it before. I checked ZwiftInsider.com to get an idea of what I was in for. I found the Route Basics: Length: 6.1 km (3.8 miles), Elevation: 73.5 m (241‘), Lead-In: 4.1 km (2.5 miles).

ZwiftPower.com results looked better than I expected. During the ride nearby riders showed about 760 with me at 640 to 650. Looking at the Group B results I slotted in at 368 out of 420. The last lap my legs got tired from the extra effort and I thought I might end up in the last few finishers but I kept pedaling. Group A counted 717, group C 350, and group D 22. For a change I wasn’t on the last page of the results, I was on page 3.

With a new route the possibilities for new personal results comes up. On Strava I achieved 6.