Being a big lump, I’m not much of a climber. But on Saturday afternoon, having done a normal lap of France, I thought I’d have a short run up the hill. I didn’t have time to do the full thing, but decided that I’d do about half of it.
Just an observation really, that it’s a quite nice climb, but the resistance I was feeling did not feel consistent with other parts of the Zwift world, including the petit kom in France. When the display was showing 13%, it felt a lot easier than that. Is this something that others have experienced or is it just me?
Maybe Zwift just noticed the 2lbs that I lost last week…
I’m on a Wahoo kickr, Apple TV 4k, everything is up to date and spun down.
Cheers,
Paul.
The strangest thing was that when I turned around and went back down I did a few light’ish spins and then a few harder ones when things started to level off and the resistance actually felt as though it was back to normal.
Maybe I just wasn’t pushing very hard. I had the rugby on my iPad so was mostly focused on that. It’s just that I did notice the gradient hit 13% at times and I didn’t have to drop down to the small chain ring. That’s pretty unusual for me at just over 250lbs.
It may depend on the type of trainer you are using. On my old wheel on trainer, whilst the resistance was controllable by Zwift, that was only to about 8%. Beyond that it all felt the same even if the display said 13% or higher.
Maybe just with the focus being on something else you’ve not noticed the effort you were doing albeit I wouldn’t expect a 13% gradient to be done in the big ring. Unless 250lb makes that normal.
I said what trainer I was using in the original post, I’m not saying that it didn’t feel like 13% out on the road, it didn’t feel like 13% in Watopia etc.
Was this just a one-off, or is it still acting up?
Once my trainer (not a Kickr) suddenly provided much less resistance than usual on a ride. At the end of the ride I rebooted the trainer and it was back to normal, and hasn’t done it since.
It’s been fine since, did another lap of France on a group ride Sunday evening and a workout at lunchtime today. Everything was perfect for both.
As I said, it even felt back to normal when I got to the bottom of the climb. I think I did the Marina sprint or something and hit over 700W. Could feel that fine.
my wheel on controlled trainer only goes to 10%,
gradients above this stay at 10%, you just go slower for a constant W/kg just like using the “difficulty” slider to alter your gearing.
