George's Weblog

I finally got my invite to join the Zwift beta program on Christmas Eve. Since I was just starting the Rapha Festive 500 Challenge on Strava I decided to wait a little while before I checked it out because I knew that I would push myself a bit once I got started and I didn't want to be riding inside when I should be outside.

I finished the Rapha challenge in six days. Because of a health issue I'm staying indoors for a while so the timing is right to give Zwift a try. Since I received the beta invite I also received an invite to test the IOS app that works in tandem with the Windows program.

Zwift is pretty basic right now, you log in, configure your sensors, customize your look and bike a bit and join right in. Once you're riding you can just spin around or you can try for the orange, green, or polka dot jersey.

Everything went very smoothly for me on the first ride. I got the polka dot jersey and held it for quite a while. The bad part was that when I lost it the person who took it away beat my time by an incredible amount leaving me wondering if he was cheating or whether his equipment just wasn't operating correctly. His time was about half of mine on the climb. Similarly, on my second ride someone took the orange jersey from me with a time that was about a third of mine. I'm not sure how the Zwift folks are going to address that sort of thing yet.

While you are riding the time changes much quicker than real life. And there is lots of scenery to look at. There are lots of butterflies flying around (too many in my opinion) and a few deer that just stand there while you whiz by.

There are several different views you can switch to while you are riding. The iPhone app has a button that lets you switch them easily from the bike. The only one missing from the videos I've seen onlin is the helicopter view. Maybe they are still working on that one.

The number of people riding is variable. I have seen as few as 5 people on and as many as 15. There are also plenty of AI riders that you can ride with. They're the blue outlines you see in the photos.

One issue I ran into on my second ride was that I stopped for a minute and then started pedaling again which should have just started me riding again. Instead the program crashed. I had to go back in. It saved a fit file but it wasn't closed properly so Strava complained when I uploaded it - it still was okay though. The bad thing about this was that I lost the experience points that I had accumulated and also my award for hitting 800 watts (which I did again on the next session).

Although it's possible to draft other riders I don't feel any benefit in the power requirement while doing it. And it's very difficult to stay the correct distance behind another rider, AI or real. I always seem to be riding up next to them or an AI rider suddenly comes by me quickly. It's much harder to draft on Zwift than in real life. They will need to work on this if it's going to be any type of a training tool.

So overall I classify this as as fun and somewhat motivating but definitely not a serious training tool yet. Knowing the background of the founder I can expect that they will be working on making it better as time goes on. And word is that they are working on a Mac version which will make me happy since I won't have to run Windoze to use it.