Zwift racing

[cowboyjon]

Any other zwift racers on here?

I was recently moved up to B class and have found it pretty much soul destroying if I'm honest, lol.

Gonna have to take a different approach to my training when the erg arrives (13 week waiting list! FML!) anyway so may as well start something different, namely not doing 3 or 4 races per week for a start.

[faach1]

I’m an occasional Zwift racer. I’ve found that when I get moved up into the next class that it takes me a good 6 or 7 races to adjust to the new tempo.

[flatbread]

I've done a few. My Zwift rig is my old track bike, 42x16 with a Powertap hub, on a Kurt kinetic "dumb" trainer.

I'm 4.5-4.7 w/kg depending on fitness so I'm in the As, I get slaughtered.

[kini62]

I love zwift. Don't too much racing as there are far too many cheaters. Last race there was a "D" rider blasting around at nearly 4w/kg for over an hour. Even worse I'm at the lower end of the C class so I get smoked. I could cheat and ride in the D category but I would still lose.

[Carl Watts]

Far to easy to cheat on a bike full stop compared to the Erg with a PM5. Beating the PM5 you really had to think outside the box. Very difficult so you can be rest assured there are far more people cheating by taking drugs than cheating by other means on the Erg.

I have taken up repairing some bike monitors and have replaced the whole mechanical side of the bike with some pretty simple electronics. I can now "Ride" at 356W cadence 30 or up to 1536W cadence 120 all day long by just turning a potentiometer. This combined with the whole weight fake makes it a nightmare if your trying to take Zwift seriously.

My idea to fix the problem with Zwift racing is to mount whatever your riding on a platform which is constantly weighing your bike and rider and its connected via USB or Wi-Fi into Zwift. Pretty hard to "manually type in" 65Kg when your 85Kg and it could also motion sense to check your actually pedaling the bike that does a synchronize check with what the bike electronics is putting out to ensure your actually on the platform and its not sitting there beside you with some of your weight plates stacked on it !!!!!! The various bikes all have known weights and so do the trainers so that can be captured into Zwift and the balance is the rider weight. There may be a lot of effort to try and reduce the weight of the equipment but this is far harder than it would be to say add weights if that gave you an advantage in cycling, which it doesn't, quite the opposite.

I should have patented the idea really but if anyone takes up production, please contact me via a PM and I can send you my bank account number.

[fischmeister]

I love racing on Zwift although I know there's a lot of cheating going on. I just don't care about it. It gives me a great and very entertaining workout. Maybe I would be gutted if I cared about the results.

Of course you need to choose the right race that suits you. If you're a poor climber it's no fun doing a race up the Alpe with very few competitors, but it's great fun doing a flat race with all Cats visible and starting at the same time.

[Carl Watts]

Recently got given a WattBike to help with my foot injury and really enjoying Zwift.

Currently down in the E-Cat but the nice thing about Zwift is the pace partner rides. Just did an hour yesterday at 1.1W/kg and kept the heartrate very low at 105 average.

Unfortunately the WattBike is a "Dumb trainer" as it has no gears or connection to the PC that changes the load as you hit a gradient but its really really fun and the time flies compared to the Erg as there is so much more to watch.

I have just set the bike up to produce 220W at a cadence of 90 so my range of cadence is about 50 to 150 to vary the power.

[Claudius]

If someone sits on a bike and wants to win a virtual bike race to compare himself - then I can understand if this one is outraged if others - in a race mind!- are cheating . But if someone is not on a bike, but on a rowing machine - so it is, do what you want - from the beginning a some kind of a cheat - For this reason and the reason of the falsified statistics I decided [???] to create my own avatar for rowing - this has virtually decided not to participate in races or sprints - because rowing on zwift is a very special form of cheating. I think the problem of categorization, and the well-known deep stacking into a lower category are in the context of a race bigger problems of the platform than the little number of individual rowers - do they have a fantasy figure or not.

[Samantha H.]

I love riding on Zwift...I worked my way to up to a double B lady. I don't cheat...and the racing is tough, but there is so much more than just racing that I enjoy. The community is great and I have made a few good friends.

I made a separate account for rowing with RowedBiker on Zwift as I don't want to "contaminate" my cycling data -although I don't row very often on Zwift, as I prefer to use ErgData.

One of my Zwift friends introduced me to rowing...and I'll be forever grateful of that.

[dabatey]

For those annoyed by cheating on Zwift, try indieVelo. It's a newish site which is free to use as its in beta testing. It's pretty big on trying to sort out cheating. Of course they can't really sort out folk knocking 20kg off their weight so they go up hills a bit faster, but they have a good handle on other cheating stuff. Also it's a lot closer to real life riding physics re drafting etc than zwift.

[Carl Watts]

You can sort out the cheating by weight as I sent the idea to Zwift a year ago.

You would need to ride on a low platform with 4 load cells in it to constantly weigh the bike plus the rider that is monitored by the Zwift software.

Problem is it would be quite expensive to make and would require users to buy it to become verified.

Other smarts built in to it to monitor that the rider is actually on the platform not that hard if you think about it as the loadcells left to right track the load shift which is in sync with the cadence.

Would work best with a proper trainer like the WattBike Atom that have 4 contact points with the ground.