Tonight's Zwift team time trial took us to the Makuri Islands for two laps of the Suki's Playground route. This course is mostly flat, except for where it isn't -- two non-trivial climbs each lap, one of which has a steep extra kicker at the top of it.

We brought a large-ish team of six riders to the line tonight -- Carson, Dusty, Lauren, Melissa, Shawn, and me. It felt great to have the extra riders in the group, with plenty of time to recover between pulls. However, we weren't quite firing on all cylinders, as Dusty was hampered by back problems, and Shawn was fighting off a cold. The team worked well together, though, and we were able to hold a tight formation and keep the group together all the way through to the beginning of the final climb. We started off at 3.6 W/kg and pretty much stayed there the whole ride. Shawn started to fall off at one point, but then rallied to close down a four-second gap, and hung on the rest of the way to the finish.

We rolled into the finish with a very respectable time of 55:40. We would have finished around the top 20% of our usual category, but unfortunately our competitive landscape has been scrambled by the fact that Carson's big power numbers have finally earned him the "Category A" designation that he probably should have had all along. This forced an upgrade from our usual "Latte" category to the much-more-competitive "Frappe" division, where everyone is super-fast, and teams can have up to three Category A riders. Little fish in a big pond, as Melissa put it. We ended up near the bottom of this division, in 108th place out of 115 teams, but that's fine -- we still rode a strong race and had a blast. And now that we're in a higher category, we can recruit more A riders, so if you're a strong Zwift rider (or even if you're not), come and join us!