After watching a wet stage 2 of the Tour de Provence I was ready for a bike ride. But lo, the weather outside was too cold and damp. The temperature stood at 38 degrees, way below what I would consider acceptable for human activity. Scrolling through upcoming events in Zwift I selected the ZRG CyclingClub Social Ride starting at 11:45 AM. The route was one I haven’t done before, Watopia’s Volcano Climb After Party. I rode the Volcano Climb but not the After Party portion. It was a long ride for me in both distance (24.32 miles when I finished), and time, 1:30:05. The route is slightly longer than my actual distance but more on that below.

ZwiftInsider.com describes the ride as “If you know your Watopia routes, the easiest way to understand this route is as two laps of Volcano Flat followed by a lap of Volcano Climb ending at the volcano KOM banner. This means the first 36km (22.4 miles) of the route is quite flat, but the final volcano climb wraps it up in painful fashion. In fact, nearly half the route’s vertical gain comes in the final 4km!”

Once the ride was underway with 339 in the group D bunch I stayed with the riders. As a point of reference when I signed into Zwift on the companion app on my phone 28,139 people were Zwifting. I looked for the fence but didn’t see one but I saw the yellow and red beacons of the leader and sweep. Most of the messages were in German since this was organized by a German Club I think. Before the ride I went into my garage and tweaked my kit and bike. This is how I looked until the ZRG ride jersey displaced my choice.

With the ride underway I stayed with the pack and in front of the fence once it was activated. I slowed some to let the fence gain on me but still with other Zwifters. At some point the fence magically moved in front of me and many others. From then on I was at the fence or behind it. All was going well until something blinked on the companion app and my heart rate monitor dropped off. For the rest of the ride it went in and out. I tried pairing, shutting Bluetooth off on my phone, connecting to the ANT+ dongle but nothing stopped the drop offs. Finally I gave up and let it do its thing. Sometimes it showed a low heart rate compared to my FitBit Versa 3 but recovered to a more reasonable level towards the end of the ride. While all of this happened I lost contact with other riders and slowed which caused me to fall short of the full route distance of 24.9 miles in the allotted time. Since my heart rate monitor worked on yesterday’s ride with no problems I don’t know what the issue was today. Tomorrow I hope the problem doesn’t surface again.

Over on ZwiftPower.com I show as #60 out of the 93 people with profiles there.

Strava hid many Zwift segments at the end of January leaving me with 2.

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