What I learned from Zwift Academy: How to dream big again

There is a way to dream big, really, really big, “fail” and still be happy. It’s been a long time since I haven’t achieved a goal and was still satisfied with the experience. I’m pretty touchy about the subject after several years of racing mountain bike World Cups and having really high hopes, only to wonder why my legs decided to leave me stranded when things got hard. I was pretty burned out on doing anything ‘for the experience’ because when you are racing, there isn’t much ‘good’ experience to be had if you aren’t very strong. The WHY to that is a whole other story but the point is I didn’t have it and it killed me.

So, just as I was preparing to give up on being a professional cyclist (for my own sanity)….I got strong. Like, really strong. I don’t know if it’s professional cyclist-strong, but it was strong enough to convince me to dream again–which is intoxicating..

Enter Zwift Academy

This is where Zwift Academy comes in. I’d been thinking about Zwift Academy for several months, looking for any information online about when it would start for 2023. There was such little information that I was starting to wonder if it was a myth. But I held on, hoping it would materialize. I’m not usually very fast in November because I’d be just finishing my off season but this year – I had a pretty big serving of cyclocross with some UCI races as my carrot towards the end. (And secretly another big dream snuck in there,a chance to qualify for Cross Worlds) In other words, I was planning on being strong through November anyway.

It felt pretty weird to throw the trainer in the car when we left Nova Scotia in late September headed down to Georgia to race cross… and the first race was about 35 Celsius. Artur kept asking me, do we really need the trainer? And I would say YES! FOR ZWIFT ACADEMY! And he would shrug, like, “okay sure, you’re going to do a full season of cross AND do Zwift Academy.”

And that’s what I did. When the announcement came, a week before Zwift Academy was supposed to start, I wrote out a schedule of all of the cross races and the Zwift workouts. I sat my coach/husband Artur down and said look, I have to do all of this in six weeks. Probably less because we had planned on being back in Canada by now. I had several book events scheduled and everything. We figured out the minimum recovery I would need to be rested enough to race AND ride to the best of my ability. In other words, I was doing two…