Virtual, Endless Summer
One Week With a Zwift Indoor Trainer
No sooner do I outfit my Walmart bike for colder weather riding than does a cold Arctic wind bring below freezing single digit wind chills and snow and ice to the area, making outdoor riding a tricky proposition. With the wisdom of age, I have momentarily suspended outdoor riding until temps get above freezing. But I still have to train for the Unbound Gravel 100 ride in May.
That's why I got a new toy - a smart trainer. A smart trainer is a device that turns a bicycle into a stationary bike. With the one I got, a Wahoo, I take the rear wheel off the bike and hook it up to the trainer.
The smart part of the equation is that the Wahoo trainer tracks how fast and how far you are pedaling and can share that with an app that can record your ride. It can also use your ride data within a virtual world where you are riding with others. The app that I'm using, Zwift, is like a video game where you're riding in a cartoonlike virtual world. Zwift is installed on my laptop; I use a portable monitor to make things easier to see.
When I'm ready to go for a ride, I put on a pair of padded shorts, fill up a water, bottle, and then bring my laptop, bottle, and towel into the unheated basement. The bike (a Bike Friday Pocket Rocket) and the Wahoo trainer are waiting for me. I launch the Zwift app on the laptop, connect the app wirelessly to the trainer and my Garmin watch (for heart rate monitoring), and join a virtual ride.
Pedal faster in the basement, and my avatar in the virtual world (punnily named Watopia) pedals faster too. My little virtual legs pump faster, and the digital display showing my speed, cadence, heart rate, and power (watts) rise accordingly. Other people around the world are also using Zwift in their basements, in a corner of a room, in a garage, or in their dedicated "pain cave", thousands of them at the same time, so there always seems to be people to virtually ride with. There are other apps, like Rouvy, which look less like a video game because they're using filmed footage of actual roads. I'd like to try that eventually, but for now I'm on the video game Zwift.
As the cold winds blow outside, I pedal the Wahoo smart trainer in the unheated basement and my Zwift avatar pedals through technicolor landscapes with sandstone mesas, volcano falls, and fantastical transparent underwater tunnels.
My avatar rides with other avatars on group rides, sometimes drafting in a large group, sometimes in small bunches, sometimes alone as I try to catch up to another avatar. We send each other thumbs up "Ride On" notes of encouragement that dance on the screen. The national flags of the other Zwifties (or Zwifters, I'm not quite sure which to use. I like Zwifties because it rhymes with Swifties) sometime float above their heads. I've ridden with people in England, Canada, the Philippines, Germany, Japan, and elsewhere.
Zwift is targeted towards "serious" cyclists, the kinds of folks that can fill (bore?) a conversation with all manner of facts and stats and know the gradients of roads around them. Me, basically. Much of the virtual community revolves around virtual racing, which looks like fun but I haven't done any races yet because I'm old and slow. There are also organized rides where people are encouraged to ride together and help each other. They’re fun as long as you choose one within your capabilities. Aim too high and it’ll be a sufferfest.
But even the chiller virtual rides can smell like competition, as people try to be the first to the top of a climb or to win the town line sprint. Me, again. The veiled competitiveness is so comically and virtually bad that some rides have a looming red blob graphic strung across the road in front of the group. It moves at a prescribed speed to keep the group together. Ride through the red blob and you are zapped to another dimension, the back of the ride I think. I've ridden right up to the blob and even accidentally rode inside it for a short while. But I backed off because I was virtually afraid.
I'm a noob but it appears that there are people in Zwift that know each other. On a group ride, one of the ride leaders chatted with others - their messages appear on screen - and there was an air of familiarity. And just like in the real world, riders riding together will often take turns at the front. There’s an active chat during the ride along with a Discord channel. I haven’t tried the Discord yet.
And so a week into riding Zwift and I've ridden nearly 140 miles, perspiration dripping off my forehead and into a puddle of sweat on the concrete floor beneath me. 140 miles in a cold and cramped basement. But also in a technicolor world filled with other people from around the world. And I've enjoyed it. Every morning I look at my Garmin watch to see my fitness data (there's a lot of it), and after every Zwift ride I analyze my numbers with a fine toothed comb.
For the first time in my life, I'm enjoying riding a stationary bike. I rode an hour the other day and it went by pleasantly. Back in the 1900s I'd try every thing - including a blindfold and music blasting into headphones - to try to lose track of time and just ride; I never made it beyond 30 maybe 40 minutes before boredom tore me from the bike. Now, an hour ride is no problem.
It's still early days and Zwift still has that new car smell. But my initial response is that I should have done this years ago. If I manage to finish the Unbound Gravel 100 miler, it will be in part due to the miles I'm putting on the Zwift and the real fitness that I'm getting from it.