Gradient
I did not plan to ride Cote de Pike.
I opened Zwift looking for something short. The estimate said twenty minutes. I had never done a portal climb before and did not know what I was selecting. I clicked in, the road tilted upward, and I started pedaling.
Twenty minutes passed. I was not at the top.
Cote de Pike is a Cat 3 climb. Two kilometers. 215 meters of elevation gain. Nearly ten percent average gradient, with sections above seventeen. It is not long. It is not legendary.
It took me forty-four minutes.
Here is what I paid attention to: heart rate. Not speed, not power, not the riders passing me on the screen. Heart rate. For the first eight minutes I held the low 120s. Through the middle thirty minutes I sat between 130 and 136. Steady. Controlled. Not comfortable, but not distressed. The kind of effort I could sustain without the system spiking.
At eighty percent, with two sections left, I pushed. Seated, not standing. I wanted to see what happened when I increased the load deliberately. Wattage went up 80%. Heart rate climbed to 150, which was the ceiling I had set for myself. It held there. It did not spike past it. In the final section I eased off. By the top, heart rate was back to 135.
The whole ride was fifty-four minutes. Several minutes of that was cruising out of the portal to cool down.
Two things I noticed.
My feet did not hurt. I have ridden with pain in my feet for so long that its absence registered as a distinct sensation. The OneUp Waves, the flat pedals I put on the Zwift Ride in January, did what flat pedals are supposed to do: they let me ride without requiring my ankles to do something my ankles cannot do. Yesterday the correction held under load. My feet do not hurt today either.
The saddle was wrong. I was testing a Selle Italia Flite, the saddle I used to race on twenty years ago. Within the first fifteen minutes I knew it did not fit the body I have now. By the end, the pain was severe enough to be distracting. Another standard from a previous version of me, adopted because it was familiar rather than because it was right. I will not ride it again.
One design decision confirmed. One invalidated. Both in the same ride.
The numbers from yesterday are not impressive. Seventy-seven average watts. Forty-four minutes on a climb most people finish in twenty. I was the slowest person on the leaderboard by a wide margin. None of that is the point.
The point is that the heart rate held. The gradient revealed the system's current state without breaking it. I sat on a ten percent grade for forty-four minutes and the system did not fail. It reported. It held. It gave me data I can use.
That is a baseline.
The pedals worked. The saddle did not. The heart held. The feet held. The ego is irrelevant.
I will ride it again.
Ken Wake is the author of Thinking Design (forthcoming) and a Professor and Entrepreneur in Residence at Georgetown University. His work explores systems, technology, design, and meaning. Tour de Ken is his weekly log.
