At the end of my last post, I was less than 48 hours away from knowing if I’d made the Team USA squad for the 2023 UCI eSport World Championships. But you probably know the answer by the title.
The confirmation email came through in due time with an official invitation to race (once again) for Team USA. It was an exciting moment but also a relief. With how my racing results have been going this year, I would have been shocked to have not made the team.
So I wiped a bead of sweat off my brow and opened up TrainingPeaks. It was time to plan my training for the next three months, hoping to time a perfect peak for the eSport World Championships. I have a massive block of virtual racing over the next couple of months, including the Zwift Grand Prix, MyWhoosh, Zwift Racing League, Proximus eSeries, and Echelon Racing League.
My training plan for the next two months is 100% filled with races, recovery rides, and openers. That’s it. There isn’t room for a single HIIT session until March, and I won’t need it anyway.
Near the beginning of December, I raced the Season 2 finale of the WTRL Zwift Racing League. Held on one of the most savage courses on Zwift, the finale featured 5 laps of the Cobbled Climbs course that included two KOM primes every lap.
The race lived up to the hype, and I finished with a Normalized Power of 390w for 55 minutes. Lap 1 was the hardest, where I won the Libby Hill prime and completed the lap with an NP of 500w for 5 minutes. Everyone was absolutely wrecked by Lap 5, and I couldn’t believe my positioning in the final kilometer.
I was barely holding 400w, yet, I was pulling away from the peloton. After nearly giving up, I did everything I could to rally in the last 500m to finish 6th on the line.
My next block of intensity was the Echelon Racing League – Tour of the Gila, which began with a 40-minute individual time trial on Friday. I used to be a TT specialist on the road, but TTs are extremely rare in the virtual racing scene. The biggest challenge of the Gila TT was maintaining my focus for almost 40 minutes. I hardly had any carrots to chase, and I just stared at my power output the entire time.
Maybe I spent too many matches on the Cobbled Climbs because I finished the Gila TT with a normalized power of 383w for 38 minutes and 16 seconds. I was comfortably in the Top 10, but my bigger goal was to win the next day atop the Mogollon climb.
However, I didn’t feel great on the Mogollon, but I did my best and came across the line in 4th. For the final 40 minutes of that race, I had an NP of 380w, including an average of 395w for 13 minutes on the final climb. It’s hard to be disappointed in that effort.
I guess the Mogollon had a nice effect on my legs since the next day, I raced on MyWhoosh at 4 AM. It’s weird to dig deep at that time in the morning when you might still be half asleep, but I made the front group all the way until 5km to go. I finished 7th, my best result on MyWhoosh since they added prize money every week. (And as you can guess, the level of competitiveness rose significantly).
After a short recovery day, I kept the big racing block going with a triple-header on Wednesday: two BL13 Festive Fury races and the Zwift NL Racing League. Despite the building fatigue, I got better in every race, including a narrow victory in the Zwift NL points race that included four full climbs of the NYC KOM on Zwift. It was absolutely savage, and I was happy with how quickly my legs recovered.
I finished off 2022 with the monthly prize money race on MyWhoosh, my first time taking on the Wollongong course in Australia. The main climb on the course is brutal – it comes in two parts, with the first being ~500m at 9% and the second part being ~1.2km long at an average of over 10%.
Thanks to my shift in sleep schedule over the past month, I finally felt good at 4 in the morning as the banner dropped. I survived the first and second climbs with the front group, which shrunk from 35 of the best virtual racers in the world to less than 15. And then…I got dropped on the descent.
Perhaps I was cross-eyed from the climb, I wasn’t paying attention, or a combination of both. But halfway down the descent, I was two seconds off the back of the lead group with no chance of catching back up. After a quick venting session that might have woken the neighbors (on Christmas morning, too), I refocused and finished the race strong in 14th place.
The last considerable effort of 2022 was the following day. Fueled by Christmas, I completed my second round of INSCYD testing, which included 20-second, 3-minute, 6-minute, and 12-minute power tests. I was happy with my results since I added power in the first three tests, including an additional 15-20w on my three and six-minute efforts. That’s a significant improvement in less than a year.
The INSCYD test was immediately followed by my first attempt at the Sub-2 Hour 100KM. These challenges only pop up a handful of times per year on Zwift, and a massive group of my friends and teammates were going after this one.
A 100KM record attempt on Zwift is a slow burn. Some would say it’s like dying a slow death. The pace is never crazy, but you basically have to maintain ~300w the whole time (for a rider my size, 70kg). 300w is pretty easy for the first half an hour, but then you might start to get tired. By the 90th minute, all you want to do is coast. But that’s not an option when the group is going 52+kph.
But once you’re into the final 10km, your mindset shifts. You can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and you don’t feel the pain as much anymore. After sitting in for most of the ride, I took my fair share of pulls in the finale, averaging 332w for the last 10 minutes. In the end, our group took the record, completing 100km in an unofficial time of 1 hour, 56 minutes, and 8 seconds. I’m proud of the accomplishment, but it’s something that I have no desire to do again. It’s really quite dull.
After a quick break over New Year’s weekend, I begin the giant racing block that takes me all the way through the 2023 UCI eSport World Championships on February 18th. Ready to see a packed race schedule? (16 races in 25 days)
Coaching by Alex Coh at Endurance Sport
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Proximus eSeries: Round 1 – January 5th
Echelon Racing League: Tour of America’s Dairyland – January 7th
MyWhoosh: Qualifier #2 – January 8th
Echelon Racing League: Intelligentsia Cup – January 8th
Zwift Racing League Season 3: Round 1 – January 10th
Proximus eSeries: Round 2 – January 12th
Zwift Grand Prix: Round 6 – January 13th
Zwift Racing League Season 3: Round 2 – January 17th
Proximus eSeries: Round 3 – January 19th
Echelon Racing League: Joe Martin Stage Race – January 20-22
MyWhoosh: Qualifier #4 – January 22nd
Zwift Racing League Season 3: Round 3 – January 24th
Proximus eSeries: Round 4 – January 26th
MyWhoosh: Prize Money Race – January 29th