I thought I was a decent indoor bike racer - MyWhoosh's Sunday Race Club told me otherwise

Imagine, if you will, the final 300 metres of a Tour de France sprint stage. Manic, isn’t it? Dozens of snarling cyclists, faces contorted with pain; arms, legs, brains bursting at the seams with lactic acid. All out war. No prisoners taken. Just a pure lust for the finish line.

Being a cyclist who’d have to lose about 20 kilograms of weight and 30 years of age (as well as gain immeasurable amounts of natural talent) to be involved in such a skirmish, I’ve more or less consigned myself to aimless ambles around the countryside. There’s simply no way I’ll ever have the capacity to feature in such cut and thrust on actual roads.

But last Sunday, in my shed of all places, that changed.

I’ve raced online many times – too many times to count. I usually do this on Zwift where the start is fast, the bit in the middle is faster, and the end is just an exercise in trying to maintain consciousness.

But my first experience of the MyWhoosh Sunday Race Club was unlike any e-race I’ve ever turned a pedal to. From the outset it was akin to those final furlongs on the Champs Elysées. As soon as the virtual starting signal was given, pixelated pandemonium materialised on my computer monitor and I was slap bang in the middle of the mayhem. There was, of course, a reason for such a hasty start, and it’s what makes the world go round. Money.

MyWhoosh’s Sunday Race Club, or SRC, is one of the few public e-sporting events where to the victor go the very real spoils of cold hard cash. And we’re not talking pocket change here. With a monthly purse of $300,000 (£220,000) MyWhoosh divides the funds out between individual winners (from 1st to 10th) and team winners through six categories - with Cat 1 being elite riders, down to Cat 6 – your average Joes and Joannes.

With real prizes at stake MyWhoosh has had to employ a stringent vetting process for all entrants. It would be easy, for example, for an elite rider to sign up for a Cat 6 race and earn a quick buck. Likewise, a 90kg rider (like myself) could attempt to fiddle the books and lose, I don’t know, around 30kg in order to be competitive on what are invariably undulating parcours.

Therefore, in order to sign up for a shot at the readies, riders are prompted to produce a video documenting weight, height, the smart trainer they intend to use and, importantly, a power passport. The latter can be found within MyWhoosh and essentially helps the SRC organisers allocate categories.

It’s a pretty involved signing up sequence that demands time, thought, a decent amount of memory on your phone, a secondary power meter and a heart rate monitor to complete. My advice would be to read the instructions carefully prior to embarking on what can potentially take the best part of a morning to get done.

With the red tape out of the way it was time to line up.

Having been given a riding position in one of the lower categories I counted down the seconds expecting maybe a flyer or two to jump from the gate. This is normal with e-racing. A rider or two with itchy fast twitch muscle fibres will gallop full gas from the start only to be swept up a kilometre down the road by the bunch. Standard. I could live with that.

Patience would be a virtue on this 45km course in the Arabian desert. The fact that it featured over 500 metres of vertical gain did little to phase me either. I’d stay in the draft on the flats and threshold my way up hills. Simples. I was so blase about the whole affair that I’d barely wound up 200 watts when we were invited to ‘GO’.

How naive. How incredibly naive.

'GO’ in SRC parlance, doesn’t actually translate to go. Evidently it means something more like ‘Let frothing at the mouth lunacy immediately commence’. Because that’s what happened. Simply trying to hang on to the back of the group – we totalled around 40 – elicited more dribble than a George Best Soccer Skills and Cider Convention.

Six hundred watts, 700 watts, 800? I managed to find the slip stream of a couple of stragglers at the back of the bunch after a minute of, well, frothing at the mouth lunacy. “OK,” I thought, reducing my power to a slightly more palatable 250 watts. “I live here now. I’ll simply recover, survive in the draft and make my big money winning move on the first ascent.”

How naive. How incredibly naive.

After a fleeting experience of what might be considered comfortable pedalling, I was once again invited by my fellow SRC riders to have a good old rummage around the hurt locker. The pace picked up, the race lined out and I found myself floundering at the back, searching for power I simply didn’t have.

Once you’ve lost the virtual draft in e-racing – a component of the game that allows you to sit in the wheels and give your legs a well-earned break – it’s pretty much Good Night, Vienna.

There are no ifs, whats or buts about it. E-racing is a skill in itself. Learning how to read a race is paramount to performance, and you better arrive at the start with highly- tuned top- end fitness. Those one, two and three-minute surges, and the ability to follow them, are how races are won and lost. The longer you can go at your maximum, the greater chance you have at improving the state, in this case, of your bank balance.

My top-end fitness could currently be compared to that of a narcoleptic sloth, so in just the space of a few short kilometres I fell off the back, had a little cry and settled into some steady state riding.

If anything this did give me the chance to spectate the higher categories (the start between each is staggered) barrel ruthlessly past me, all vying for the top step of the podium and its associated spoils.

I’m not done here though. If you need me, I’ll be in the shed. Vo2 Max intervals are on the menu for the next two months…