INDOOR PAIN = OUTDOOR GAIN?

After countless hours sweating it out in his shed, CW’s Steve Shrubsall decided to find out if he could convert Zwift-toughened tenacity into a real-world PB

- Steve Shrubsall

As the end of our locked-down summer approached, it was time for a personal stocktake: what had I achieved? I’d accrued a few dozen hours of aimlessly ambling around Zwift’s virtual parcours; I’d tried and failed to teach my daughters long division; oh, and there was a notable increase in empty bottles of booze amassing in the recycling bin. I had become directionless. Bereft of my usual way of life, I’d become a jack of all trades: an imitation maths teacher, a pseudo-cyclist, a semi-professional imbiber of premium strength lager beer. Something needed to change – ideally the erasure of this blasted virus – but failing that, I needed a cycling target achievable in these restricted times.

The virtual time trialling scene is – thanks to Covid restrictions –currently booming, with events of various distances on flat, undulating and mountainous courses regularly popping up on the Zwift calendar. I bought into this and raced countless virtual TTs over the course of lockdown. Road racing on Zwift, although fun, had started to get a little demoralising – my comparatively hefty 83kg pins my FTP to around 4.4w/ kg, meaning that in A-category races, the merest suggestion of a slope leaves me reeling in the red, before being promptly spat out the back. On the other hand, in a race against the clock on a flat course, comparative heft is no disadvantage. The question was, could I train to excel in Zwift TTs in a way that would result in real-world improvement too, ready for when restrictions were lifted?

Indoor disciplines