Indoor Advantages and Word Counts

This article from Cycling News came across my desk yesterday and thought it was both interesting and obvious at the same time.

Pro rider Ashleigh Moolman Pasio, who lives in Girona, has been forced onto Zwift during the cycling lockdown she’s had to endure in Spain. She, like many people (a client just told us about this yesterday, too), has noticed an uptick in power numbers after many hours on the trainer and attributes it to the ‘brute force’ that you consistently produce while sitting, pedaling and going nowhere. I noticed this long ago during every winter ‘lockdown’ we had before outside riding took over in the spring. I’m sort of curious as to why this comes as a surprise, but I guess one reason is that pros simply ride outside all the time (in Girona the trainer definitely wouldn’t be necessary very much).

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Ashleigh Moolman Pasio (Image credit: Getty Images)

Anyhow, Ashleigh got let out last week and smashed a new QOM on Rocacorba, the nastiest climb Girona can throw at you. That’s something after 2 months of probably not a single ride outside! 31 minutes and change, if you’re wondering.

If this is true across the rider spectrum I wonder if indoor training on Zwift or other platforms will become de rigeur in the winter months for pros going forward?

And finally a little epilogue to yesterday’s 1000 blog article article. I decided to dig deep into my WordPress stats and found all sorts of data that I never really knew existed; one of which was my ‘word count’, i.e. the number of words I’ve thrown down on these pages over the last 12 years. The answer is: 379,883

Fine, but what does that mean? Glad you asked! Here are a few classic books that some of us have read, along with their word counts:

  • The Sun Also Rises: 67,707
  • The Hobbit: 95,356
  • The Grapes of Wrath: 169,481
  • Ulysses: 262,869
  • Middlemarch: 316,059
  • War and Peace: 561,304

So I’m somewhere between Eliot and Tolstoy, at least in terms of quantity. I don’t know where this goes from here, but at least it’s recorded. It will be interesting to see if I get more or less long winded as the years progress. I’ll just stop here because I think I feel it coming on…