Zwift Tour de Boudicca — Stage 1: Team Time Trial

My Zwift team, Revolution Velo Racing, put a lot of effort into creating a women’s Stage Race. I don’t think there have been any before this on Zwift and hopefully, it inspired a ton more.

The first stage of the Zwift Tour de Boudicca was the team time trial. At first, I was just going to wing it, as I do in most races, but the B squad I was on wanted to practice. How do you practice for a team time trial on Zwift?

Well, it was actually pretty easy. Somehow, women who lived across several timezones, in several countries were able to meet three times. Unlike in real life when you try to make plans with people and there’s always a schedule conflict.

Zwift has a meet-up feature in their system so one of the women on the team created it and found the course we’d be racing.

The first practice was rough, as anyone could imagine getting five women together who’ve never ridden before would be. We connected on Discord to talk through strategy as we practiced. Some of us would surge off the front and drop the others.

Some of us, like me, dealt with power drop-outs and fell off the back. I either had to sprint or ask them to slow down for a minute so I could catch back up to the group. We had to figure out how long we’d pull up front and when we backed off, we had to…