On paper week 7 of ZRL Season 2 was finally my opportunity to shine after several climbing focused courses and some hardware issues kept me from racing the past few weeks. After the break I was more than excited to see last week’s multiple ascents of the Volcano KOM like swapped for 5 intermediate sprints on the mostly flat Libby Hill After Party course… flat sprints are one of the few areas where I excel in the virtual world of Zwift racing.

And with a full squad of 6 riders the racing action started off quite well. I went too early in the first sprint, but still nabbed a decent haul of points. And as the field split post-sprint the entire team made the front group of 40 odd riders. However just after that split formed, one of the most dreaded screens in Zwift popped up:

Yep, all of 10 minutes into the race my KICKR dropped power. As my avatar slowed to a halt, I waved a solemn goodbye to the lead group and every other rider on the course. Eventually I was able to swap to ANT+ and get back in motion, but the rest of my race looked something like this:

Thankfully while I was drifting ever further from the front of the race, the rest of the team was executing our race strategy perfectly. Race radio, aka Discord Voice, more than proved its worth during a complicated race to manage. As Scott put it after the finish:

The final points race of season 2 was very tactical. Targeting sprint points but still leaving something in reserve for the kicker made for the most enjoyable zwift race I have done to date

Key to this strategy was our official DS and premier league racer Tom who coaxed us through all of the sprint efforts. We may have been down one of our two designated sprinters after my mechanical, but that didn’t stop Daghan, aka Turk, from chasing every sprint point available. As Tom put it after the race:

Yeah. I’m mad at @turk for not listening to me and sprinting on lap 4. Fastest time on that segment would’ve gotten us 20 pts! But I still love him and he got us the most points. So he did an impressive job. So thanks @turk for not listening and doing wild Turkey shit. It usually works out anyways.

While Daghan was the leading scorer on the team, Scott’s hard fought top ten finish up Libby Hill was close behind for another 42 points. And every single rider on the team was in the double digits on the scoreboard even if I finished a full 20 minutes behind the lead group. In total it was sufficient to finally break our streak of 6th place finishes in the road races - just one step off the podium in 4th place in our best result thus far:

In the season standings this lifted us up a few spots to where else…. 6th place. Though with just a handful of points separating 6th, 7th and 8th going into the final week of racing there is still a lot of fight for in the season finale TTT:

As usual, we streamed the race live on both Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/tobedeterminedcc) and our Youtube channel: