That's the Ticket.

I was onto something Monday.

I think the same old, same old was starting to get to me. Easy enough when you're riding the trainer. I doubled down on that by sticking to the same route for the last year. I knew every inch of it. Every sprint, every incline, everything. As soon as I saw the leaderboard for a given segment, I already knew if I was going to try. I just felt like I had a pretty good handle on where the edges were.

Then today I tried a new route.

I had no idea what was in front of me. I just gave everything I hit my best. I fell in with a group of four or five really strong riders and started rotating pulls. There was another rider in the group, and I knew he was deluded as I am about our relative abilities in a sprint. It was the way he closed gaps and hung back on the lead up to a sprint told me he was going to jump.

My eyes narrowed a little.

As we approached the sprint, he drifted back off the front and sat on my wheel. When the line came, he hit an aero boost and stomped it. Squirrel! I jumped as well and passed him just as his boost faded, taking that sprint jersey in the process. This was fun.

The group reformed, and I struggled to hang on the back for a while as my heart rate descended from the ionosphere. Just as it did, another sprint popped up. Again he drifted back. This time I jumped a little early and gapped him, taking another jersey. Again I wheezed and coughed and flailed as I latched back on with the group.

When we finally reached the third and final sprint of the loop, I was sure I was cooked. I had been limiting myself to one sprint per workout to avoid burning myself out, and was fairly sure my old ass didn't have in matches left in my back pocket. However, when the entire group jumped, I went with them. Another jersey.

The reason I mention this is not because I think these were earth-shattering events. They were a string of ones and zeroes in a disposable bit bucket. The jerseys meant nothing. What did mean something to me was when I looked at the data later and saw power numbers I haven't seen in a while. Not PRs by any means, but significantly higher than what I'd been achieving. 

After eight straight days of workouts, I wasn't exactly primed. I was a little tired. While the new scenery may have inspired these numbers, I think it was the head-to-head competition. Instead of trying to beat a number, I was trying to beat a person. 

It had all become static, with pre-conceived ideas about what was possible in a given scenario. It wasn't about throwing caution to the wind and taking your best shot. Adding the human element into the mix with all of its variability made the difference.

Problem is, it's rare I get in a group like this. Races never line up with the times I'm free to ride, and a steady diet of racing would absolutely burn me out in short order. Mostly I fall in with triathletes doing steady state intervals or people just riding around. Being at a sprint point when somebody uncorks one? Extremely rare. Being in the same group with that person? The odds are comparable to winning the Tri-State Lotto.

But yeah, it was a lot of fun. The same sort of fun I used to have racing. Of course, it had a tiny fraction of the variables that go into a good crit, but it was as close as I've gotten on Zwift.

I needed that, if only to push the edges out a little more.