After two back to back 40+ mile bike rides and looking at the weather forecast I made an executive decision for today’s bike ride. A line of rain was approaching from the northwest wetting the streets so the decision was to ride Zwift. I wasn’t sure if there was a make up ride for stage 5 (the only stage I missed) of the Tour of Watopia but the companion app showed one starting at 1:32 PM. That gave me enough time to get everything humming on my new desktop computer to livestream the bike ride.

Stage 5 was titled “High Life” and I chose group B riding the Legends and Lava route. I guessed from the title there would be some climbing and there was. The stage description listed the 15.3 mile distance but nothing about climbing. I went to ZwiftInsider.com to find out more information. There I learned the route include 1,053 feet of climbing. Additionally it said, “This route was designed to hit three different segments which test your sprint, VO2, and threshold power: Sprint: Watopia Sprint Forward, VO2: Titans Grove Reverse KOM, Threshold: Volcano KOM.

Checking for previous rides on the route in SportTracks it showed my only other ride on March 7th, 2021. The distance matched today’s but the climbing was only 861feet. This left me wondering what today’s climbing would be. Today it turned out to be 1,152 feet according to Strava. Checking Strava for the March 7th ride the climbing was same as today as was the distance. SportTracks and Strava apparently calculate this differently. There are other features I use SportTracks for.

As the start time neared the wet streets dried, the sun came out and the temperature started going up from the 60 degrees the rain brought. But I stayed the course to complete the Tour of Watopia, all 5 stages.

Riding the terrain seemed about the same resistance from the Wahoo Kickr Snap smart trainer. My last ride the resistance cranked up I pushed the watts over 200 before the ride began. I didn’t do that today. Maybe I should have.

The number of riders today at the start was around 300 and increased to around 330 as the we rode. I wasn’t near the front the entire ride hanging around position 288 or so. Jumping over to ZwiftPower.com to check the results for group B I came in at 178 out of 182. Group A shows 202 riders, Group C 107, and Group D 9.

I record two top results today in Strava: PR on Legends and Lava (1:00:22) and 2nd fastest time on Titans Grove, Southbound (20:08). The March 7th ride had one top result on a different segment. Today’s ride was 3 minutes faster than March 7th.