Tonight's Zwift team time trial took us to Watopia for three laps of the Hilly KOM route. Medical issues knocked out some of our core team this week, so we were left with a skeleton crew of Carson, Melissa, Shawn and me going up against some big strong teams in the Frappe division.

The course features three climbs (and descents) of the old-school classic KOM, making it hard to get a good team rhythm going. I was sort of improvising the pull schedule on the fly, to try to keep us together on the climbs, and protect the lightweights on the descents. My instructions got a little jumbled by the second lap when oxygen deprivation started to set in, but the team figured it out and made it work. Melissa and Shawn stepped up with some long pulls in the second and third laps, and Carson was always ready to do whatever was asked of him.

Our finishing time of 41:39 was solid, but now that we've been upgraded to a higher division, competing against teams composed of A and B riders, our position in the rankings is not quite as lofty as it had been in previous weeks (88th out of 108 teams as of this writing). Everyone seemed pretty knackered by the end, though, so I feel good about our effort -- nice work, folks! Come and join us next week to get in on the fun!