The week’s bike rides ended on the Zwift France Casse-Pattes. France wasn’t on the open Zwift worlds so I created a personal meetup. Actually I created two of them. The first started but my avatar wouldn’t move. I think after creating it I marked myself as not attending by mistake. The second was one went as planned. This was the 4th time riding the Casse-Pattes. I checked ZwiftInsider.com to see what the route profile and what I was getting into. Zwiftinsider.com describes the route name, “French cyclists use the term “casse-pattes” (literally “leg-breaking”) to refer to particularly difficult parts of a ride, or roads that awkwardly change gradient and break a cyclist’s rhythm. Released with Zwift’s France map for the first-ever Virtual Tour de France, the Casse-Pattes route covers the large outer loop of the map in a clockwise direction. The first 12km is pan-flat with two timed sprint segments, but then that rhythm is broken up in the back half by two timed KOM climbs.” The second climb had me out of the saddle several times when the gradient got nasty. Two Strava top results: 3rd fastest time on Petit KOM (12:09) and 3rd fastest time on Casse-Pattes (54:06). The Petit KOM was the longer second climb. It appears getting out of the saddle helped. My time doesn’t come near the KOM record by Guy “Rouge” W at 3:30.

Recapping the Week’s Rides

This week’s 156.59 almost equaled the previous week’s 161.87 miles. Six of the seven rides were virtual with Friday the only outdoors ride. November riding is rolling along with 648.57 road and virtual miles. That exceeds 2022’s 242.2 combined miles and 2021’s 358.07 combined miles.