Yesterday, the Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that we were not to leave our homes except for a few very specific reasons. He said the police had the powers to enforce this but it is currently nothing like other countries like Spain where there are big fines being handed out. That may change as our public have been very slow to heed the message. The whole management strategy is to "flatten the curve" i.e. reduce the speed of spread such that there is time to prepare better and to ensure the NHS is not totally overwhelmed as many countries already are. It gives time to get more respirators, more staff trained, more ICU beds and premises and hopefully at some point a treatment or immunisation that works.
This is all really grim and due to the pace of things, people's awareness, including mine has lagged behind the reality. I believe I have now "got it" as have many people but many others still haven't and are ignoring the advice/requests/demands to self isolate. We are now in partial lockdown which is proving very hard for many people both practically and emotionally.
Well this is a cycling blog, so the point I'm making here is that the impact of Covid-19 has been to drive cyclists off the roads and that is leading to a massive upsurge in demand for on-line cycling and in particular, my particular poison, Zwift. To illustrate the point, they have a thing about "Peak Zwift" each year which is the maximum number of concurrent users on the system at any time. This normally occurs around 7.30pm on the first or second Tuesday in January. Sure enough it did the same this year at around 16,700 users. However, on Sunday I watched it hit 20,000 and I expect it to carry on past that. Even my brother, Paul, asked me how to get on Zwift - so it really must now be a post-isolation thing.
My season's racing plans are in tatters with all races cancelled until the end of June at the earliest - which is fine as in the scheme of things this is unimportant. However, I am switching back to getting my racing done on Zwift. Tom, my coach, spoke to his athletes and he and I agreed to suspend things until September as we had nothing to train for. So I now need to work out how to best mix training and probably weekly racing all on the turbo.
British Cycling have set up a series of 8 (I think) races over the next 8 weeks and I did the first one at lunchtime today. The Youtube video is below. Unfortunately, I seem to have accidentally switched off my voiceover although some may see that as a blessing. I am the one in the green cap and green socks.
Ride on!