Tour de Zwift 2022 is here.

Route and stage details from Zwift Insider.

Shane Miller’s video breakdown of this Year’s tour.

TDZ is a wrap

Stage 1 – Flat is Fast

I kicked off Stage 1 of the tour using my Tri bike as this was slated to be a flat stage with ~800 feet elevation. Felt great to be on my Tri bike again after riding mostly the road bike these last few months.

Stage 2 – Mountain Madness

This was the “Tour of Fire and Ice” route in Watopia with a mountain top finish on Alpe du Zwift. ADZ always makes for a great climbing benchmark ride. I came into this stage with some left knee niggles from this week so really wanted to approach the ride conservatively.

Prior to the ride I took a look at my Strava ADZ past segments so the goal became to aim for 260 – 280 watts on the climb. It took approximately 34 minutes to the foot of the climb which made for a great warmup to loosen up my legs and manage how my knee felt. There was no immediate pain so I was very optimistic that I would be able to hold a solid tempo pace up the climb.

Like any other route, having done ADZ including vEveresting the climb really added a sense of comfort and knowing when to push and recover during the ride and the 21 switchbacks.

At the finish, I was able to average 262 watts on the ADZ segment. Quite happy with this performance and it’s a solid benchmark for my continued IRONMAN training this season.

Stage 3 – Round and Round

Opted for my IRL Tri bike again for this stage as it was mainly flat. Flat rides make it hard to be conservative until you get to a steady ground that’s your place of comfort. This was a bit further into the ride and I settled with a group of about 5 to 8 riders. The Stage consisted of 5 laps and the Tri bike was a great choice today and I kept a TT position to settle in.

Stage 4 – Let’s Get Dirty

Can’t say much about the Jungle route, definitely not one of my favs on Zwift. However, made most of this stage and showed up with my mountain bike which is always the better choice over my Tron or Trek Madone.