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There is a special kind of optimism that lives in the five minutes before a team time trial. You’re warm, your legs feel suspiciously good, the whole squad is in the pen, and for one shining moment you genuinely believe this is going to be smooth.

Oh, boy, it was not smooth. It was London 8. With Box Hill. On a Thursday night.

We rocked up seven strong. We rolled out as six. We finished as four. If you’ve ever done a TTT, you already know exactly where this is going — but stick around, because the maths is funnier when you watch it happen in real time.

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The pen took a hostage

Every Zwift TTT has a villain, and tonight the villain was the starting pen. Nicole was right there with us, ready to go, fully committed — and then the gates opened, we rolled, and she… didn’t. Stuck. Frozen. Watching the rest of us pedal off into the London evening like the closing scene of a sad movie.

One moment you’re a team of seven. The next you’re six, and there’s a teammate somewhere behind you yelling things into a headset that the rest of you will never hear. If you’ve been there, you felt that in your chest just now. Sorry, Nicole. We poured one out for you at the first sprint banner. 🍾

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Box Hill, you absolute menace

For the uninitiated: Box Hill is the climb on the London 8 route that looks gentle on paper and personal in practice. It’s not long. It’s not even that steep. But drop it into the middle of a team time trial, when everyone’s already buried, and it becomes the great separator. The road tilts up, the watts go up, the group goes elastic, and you quickly find out who’s having a good night and who is quietly negotiating with their own legs.

Look at that elevation profile. It sits there all flat and innocent for the first 12km, and then — bang — that lump in the back third. That’s where the TTT stopped being a group ride and started being a survival exercise.

The route itself is genuinely gorgeous — looping past Westminster, over the Thames, through the City of London, with the little checkered flag teasing you long before you actually get to stop. Beautiful scenery to suffer in. Very on-brand for London.

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The fearless four

Here’s where the team time trial does its honest accounting. In a TTT, your time is taken on a set number of riders crossing the line together — so the goal is to keep that group glued and roll over the line as one tidy unit. After Box Hill had its say, the front of our group settled into four: me, Nicky, Graig and Jason. We finished together, turns taken, gaps closed, the whole “no rider left behind” thing — at least at the pointy end.

And honestly? Crossing the line in a little knot of four, all cooked, all having dug in for each other — that’s the part of team time trials I actually love. The number on the clock matters less than the fact that nobody soft-pedalled away from anybody. We suffered as a unit. Romantic, in a sweaty, overheated, “why-do-we-do-this” sort of way.

Special mention to the 0.2-second gap between Nicky and me on the results. Twenty-something minutes of racing and we get separated by less time than it takes to blink. I’d like to say I planned that. I did not. That was pure “I cannot physically go any faster, but I refuse to let go of that wheel.” 🩷

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Not their night (and that’s allowed)

Now, Glen and Hennie. Two genuinely strong riders. Two people who, on a normal day, would be the ones dragging me up Box Hill by the scruff of my jersey. But here’s the truth about endurance sport that the highlight reels never show you: sometimes it’s just not your day.

Maybe the legs were flat. Maybe work was a circus. Maybe load shedding chose violence, and they were racing on half a charge and a prayer. It happens to all of us. The strongest rider in the group on Monday can be the one quietly suffering off the back on Thursday, and it says absolutely nothing about how good they are — only that bodies are bodies and they don’t read the start list.

So no shame, gents. You’ll be back up front next time, and I’ll be the one clinging to your wheel begging for mercy on the climb. Balance restored.

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The numbers don’t lie (they just gloat)

The ride report is where you get to relive the suffering in convenient chart form. Average power that says “you tried.” A heart rate trace that climbs steadily and then absolutely spikes the second the road points up. And that one glorious 479w spike that I’m choosing to believe was a tactical surge and not pure panic on Box Hill.

And then there’s the Strava breakdown afterwards — the segment-by-segment receipt of every place the route tried to break you. Box Hill KOM at 178w average and 155bpm, which translates roughly to “fine, technically, but my soul left my body somewhere around the halfway mark.” The Fox Hill Descent at 52.7km/h was the only part where I felt genuinely fast, mostly because gravity was doing the work.

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Final thoughts from the back of the group

So that was London 8. We lost one to the pen, lost two to the day, and four of us dragged each other over the line in one piece. By TTT maths that’s a slightly catastrophic attrition rate. By human maths it’s a really good night — teammates who showed up, a brutal climb survived, and a results screen with all our silly little names on it.

Box Hill, I’ll see you again. I won’t be happy about it. But I’ll be there.

And Nicole — next week the pen lets you out. We believe. 🩷

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🩷The Endurance Diaries🩷