Hey all, yesterday was the 2nd race of the 3 part of Zwift Racing League.
This time around the race was set in France on a route called Douce France. This route is relatively short and flat, 24.8 km long and only 136.7 m elevation.
The race was a Point Race, meaning that apart from the points you get for your finishing place, there were 4 different primes put on the course. 3 sprints and one climb (KOM).
On the primes there are bonus points given for being first across line, with 20 points for the first one and 19 point for the second rider and so on, so the first 20 got bonus points, same time there are also given bonus points to the 5 riders that are fastest through the segment, no matter if it is the first or last rider that makes the sprint or KOM fastest.
The Route:
There were Bonus point on all 4 higlighted segments above, our team [DBR]Hailstorm were ready from the start with 6 riders and the aim was as always to end in top 3.
On short routes like this things start from the pens with full power and to be honest there is not much of a relax moments during the entire race, as soon as we gout out of the pens we were 39 riders out of 60 in a front group. The first 6 km were challenging with high power and the route has quite a few rolling hills there, and constantly someone pushing the front, so when we came to the first prime segment after 6,7 km, Jarvis Sprint reverse, a short flat sprint only 200m long the front group got split a little bit, I came through the segment 11th so I scored extra 10 points there, kept my place in the front that was reduced to 29 riders.
Next prime was after 10.8 km, a short climb up the Aqueduc KOM, 400m with average 3% incline, when we hit the KOM things got really interesting, alot of riders went all out there, i managed to come over as 14th rider so another 7 extra point in the books, but I lost the front group a bit on the top there, and all of a sudden I was trailing by 4-5 seconds, It took all I had for the next couple of minutes to catch up and as I caught up, there was not much energy left and only focus was to hang on, at this time the front group was reduced to 13 including me.
Not long after we came to the third Prime, Pave Sprint, a 340m long flat sprint, there again i tried to keep up and hang on, came through as number 13 and got 8 points, just barely managing to keep up with the group.
From here it was mostly flat the remaining 10 km, with just a few small short bumps. We had gotten a good lead on the next group of 10 riders with about 15 seconds at time and looked like we could keep that until the end. When there were about 4 km left the chasing group really put in some effort to try and catch up, and they managerd to reduce the lead to only 3 seconds with 1.2 km left to go, but we did increase the pace so they fell back again and did not get any closer.
The last Prime was the Marina sprint, again a flat 340m sprint to the finish line, the last 1 km I had no juice left to go in an all out sprint so I kept with the back of the group and sailed extra 8 points there by coming in 13th in total out of the 60 riders.
The effort over the race was fair, avg. 209w or 2.3w/kg finishing 43min 42sec.
Same as in the last race there there were 3 teams that we were keeping an eye on, Team CLS, SRT and Team Velos Feathers but SRT surprisingly did not do well in this race and ended up in 6th place, But Rapha_RCC with only 4 riders really shined in this race and got the first place, closely followed by Team CLS, we ended in 3rd place with Team Velos Feathers coming in 4th place.
So after 2 out of 6 races we share 1st place with Team CLS and with Rapha_RCC , SRT and Team Velos just bnehind. It is sure that this will be a hard competition all the way to the end.
Until next time, Ride on!
If you are considering joining the WTRL but don’t know where to look for a team to join, feel free to reach out and I will gladly help out.
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