(Originally posted June 18, 2023, with updates at the end)
If you own the Wahoo Kickr bike, you already have handlebar-mounted buttons for things like using power-ups, turning left and right, making u-turns, etc., so you might be wondering how much value there might be to adding the new Zwift Play controllers to your system. Well, I did, by rationalizing the $99 introductory price as a pretty small upgrade after the $3000+ cost of the bike. (Another victory for mental accounting!) Anyway, here’s one user’s story:
The Zwift play controllers are two controllers which attach to your handlebars and provide gaming console-like buttons (the classic up-down-left-right and “A-B-Z-Y”, because if your company name starts with Z you need a Z button more than you need an X button) as well as broad paddles you can push or pull. So, it’s eight buttons (that can differentiate between press and long-press) and two two-way paddles to add to the various buttons already on the Zwift bike’s handlebars.
Installing the Zwift Play paddles on a Wahoo Kickr Bike
Installation could not have been easier. They go on just like in the video, no spacers needed. And the fit is snug, too… on my bike at least there was less deflection in the controllers when pushing a button (though maybe I just have a softer touch than the person in the video). They do a pretty good job of keeping out of the way, though you should consider your grip. Riding on the hoods is fine but sometimes I put my hands just behind the hoods, and it is just a little harder to get my thumbs out of the way when I do. I think I’ll adjust, it’s not enough of an annoyance to be a deal-breaker.
Zwift Play quality of workmanship
The Zwift Play controllers seem nice. The have good heft to them and it doesn’t seem like they’re prone to break down soon. The buttons do seem a bit stiff for my taste. They look like X-Box buttons, but they don’t have nearly as good a feel. This is probably due to the rubber membrane that sits over the buttons, and since I’m a lot more likely to sweat on my Zwift Play controllers than I am my X-Box controller, I think it’s probably a good trade-off.
The Good
Having the Zwift Play controllers on my Wahoo Kickr bike eliminates just about every need I had to touch my iPad (or pick up my Apple Remote) during gameplay. Hitting the “up” button would call up the in-ride menu, and navigation from there was pretty easy using the left-right buttons to change options and the “A” and “B” buttons for OK and cancel, respectively. There are also a couple of actions such as returning a “ride-on!” which I was never able to do using the iPad or Zwift Companion interfaces.
Pulling either of the handlebar paddles in the outboard direction activates steering, and it does seem to me to be smoother than using the buttons on the Wahoo Kickr bike. Steering is still a feature I don’t use much in Zwift, but it works better now, and who knows? If enough people adopt the Zwift Play then the developers might integrate steering more into the game. Since steering by button or paddle is still the part of the bike interface that is the least analogous to its real-world counterpart it still feels like a weak link in the interface, despite being the best implementation of steering yet.
Pushing the handlebar paddles in the inboard direction activates braking, and this braking is different from how it’s implemented on the Wahoo Kickr bike. On the bike, using the physical brake handles, the braking mechanism slows the flywheel on the bike, but that doesn’t translate into braking in the game. Zwift doesn’t care how fast your flywheel is turning, just in how much power you’re applying to it. So coasting and braking (using the Kickr bike’s brakes) are the same thing.
The Zwift Play brakes, on the other hand, brake the in-game bicycle. This could be immensely useful for those time when you are dropping your pacebot, which I unfortunately seem to do at the top of a lot of hills).
If you’ve been using your computer as your Zwift interface, you probably could do all of this all along, but for people like me who have been playing on an iPad or an AppleTV, it’s like a brand-new feature!
(I also noticed during my first ride that Zwift finally did add the “teleport” option, which I have been extremely eager to have. It’s not related to the Play, as far as I know, but I was pretty stoked to see it)
The Bad
I can’t say that there’s anything I’d call “bad” about the new Zwift Play controllers. Using them does not preclude you from using the buttons on the Wahoo Kickr bike, so if you’d rather hit the bike’s button for a power-up, you still can. I’ve mentioned the stiff buttons and the slightly intrusive mounting, but these are not huge issues.
What’s Missing
What I really want is to be able to set my own commands for the Zwift Play buttons. There is some overlap between the Play and the Kickr bike, and by having both you have two buttons for power-ups, two for u-turns, and redundant controls for steering (though, as I mentioned above, the Play does it better). Let me re-map one of those buttons so I could quickly look behind myself to see who’s behind and catching up. That would be sweet.
Final Word
I am pretty excited about the Zwift Play. I didn’t have the effect on my Zwifting that getting moving from my bike-on-a-trainer to the Wahoo Kickr bike did, but then again it’s only $100. I hope that this will open the door to more users adopting it, because if a critical mass of Zwift riders have steering (and braking, for that matter), it would open the door for Zwift to making a bigger commitment to those features in the game. It’s great that Zwift can be played on many different setups, but it does mean that game development must necessarily be focused on the lowest common denominator. If the Zwift Play becomes part of people’s base setups, it will create opportunities for everyone.
Final, Final Word (update, May 2024)
Well, it’s about a year later, and I have to say that I’m not using the Zwift Play anymore. For my setup, it just didn’t add value. The Kickr Bike provides a lot of the same buttons (turning, power-up, etc) and I because I ride with the Zwift companion on my phone on my handlebars and because the iPad I use for display is within reach, there just isn’t much I can do with the Play that I can’t already do elsewhere. I think braking might be the only thing that the Play does that the Kickr Bike doesn’t (the Kickr Bike has brakes but they don’t affect the game — rather they affect the actual flywheel) but I can’t recall the last time I wanted to use my brakes in the game. Maybe something technical like Repack Ridge would benefit from it, but in my humble opinion that’s all still a gimmick. The Play’s turning controls are a little more to my liking than the Kickr Bike’s buttons, but that’s just not enough to make it worth it.
In the end, I found that the Play’s mounting position got a bit in the way when I was riding. In particular, when riding uphill it became a little bit of an annoyance figuring out where I could put my hands so that my fingers could grasp the handlebars comfortably.
I still think the Play is a nice bit of gear, and if I was still using my road-bike-on-a-trainer setup that I had before I moved to the Kickr Bike, I think it would be a terrific addition. Since so much of the functionality is duplicated on the Kickr Bike, though, in the end I just wouldn’t recommend it for those users.
I am slowly closing in on Zwift level 50 which was (until recently) the highest level attainable. Alas, I suppose enough people had hit level 50 that Zwift HQ decided it needed to raise the roof to level 60, but I suppose it’s just as well. After all, my zeal for Peloton started to wane after ride #1000, and for Hydrow once I got my t-shirt for rowing a million meters, well, it was just hard to get psyched to do another million meters to get the hat. So if past is any indication, if they hadn’t raised the maximum level I probably would have started looking around for another platform.
Not that there’s a whole lot to be gained by maxing out Zwift. All you really get is some kit you’re probably not going to wear. There was sort of a cool Mondrian kit that I got a little while ago (level 40?) and wore for a while but mostly it’s not stuff you really want anyway. There are also some frames and wheels that are unlocked at later levels but once you have the Tron bike, the marginal gain from some of these super-high-end upgrades is pretty marginal. I guess you still need a time trial bike and a mountain bike, but there’s not a ton to differentiate any of them, really.
(NB: And that’s a good thing. Zwift and similar platforms should really be about the rider and the effort and not things that you can buy. So if anyone is actually reading this, please don’t take anything I’m saying as an argument to have more differentiation between frames and wheels. Let the rider make the difference, I’m good with that.)
Still, there are levels, and where there a levels there are people like me who have an irrational need to get to the top. So I’d like to talk about how that’s done, and talk about a couple of very big flaws in Zwift’s system of awarding points.
Fundamentally, you get points for riding. The farther you ride, the more points you get. Zwift Insider has a good guide to the basics of the Zwift points system, so instead of rehashing those basics here, I’ll just point you to their site.
Did you actually go and read that page? The part about how riders using the metric system get points faster? I quote:
Sorry, Imperials: you will accumulate XP 7.3% faster if you ride in metric units. (100km=2,000 XP, while the equivalent mileage, 62.13=1864 XP.)
So, that by itself is a pretty big inequity right there. Why not give riders using the imperial system 32 xp instead? That’s still a fraction less than the metric system users get, but it’s a lot smaller difference than what they have today. That 7% or so difference between metric and imperial is absolutely huge when you start to think about the distances that you’ll be riding to level up.
The other big flaw in the awarding of Zwift points has to do with the fact that, outside of workout mode, Zwift points are awarded based on distance and not on effort. This means that to level up, one is behooved to do a lot of riding on flat roads in large groups where you can get the maximum speed for your effort. So, we’re talking a lot of Fuego Flats with the robot-pacers, which is about as boring as this game can get.
As I write this, the Tour of Watopia ’23 is drawing to a close. For the past month, I’ve been doing ToW rides because those rides give double points. So, for a month now, I’ve been seeking out the longest, flattest routes that are offered, because that is how I can gain the most points. Stages 3 and 4 (mountains and dirt, respectively) are the least valuable. Now that we’re into the “makeup week” it’s all Stage 1 (the flats) for me. Yawn.
As the saying goes, “What gets rewarded gets repeated.” So that’s why you’ll find me on the flats.
PS: Interested in “XP Farming”? There’s a good Reddit post here that uses the Crit City route and a time trial bike (capitalizing on the short length of the route and the fact that on the time trial bike you always get the XP bonus rather than another “power-up”). A much more elaborate (but more rewarding) strategy is offered by Shane Miller, involving interval workouts on the Alpe d’Zwift. You do need to complete the climb for it to work, and the big payout happens if you both own the lightweight wheels and then are awarded them at the top (so you are instead awarded 1000xp bonus). Shane says this happens often but frankly it has never happened to me. I’m always getting the helmet or some other prize that really should be accompanied by the “sad trombone” sound effect.
Just about every time I ride Zwift, I wish I hadn’t won the Tron Bike. I still remember how much I wanted it at the time, and I remember how hard it was to get, but now that I’ve had it for a while, I am actually a little sad that this part of the Zwift story is over for me.
If you’re reading this post, you’re probably already familiar with the Zwift Concept One bike, which is far better known by its nickname, the “Tron Bike”. Unlike most other bikes in the game, it can’t be bought, it has to be earned by completing the Everest Challenge and then climbing another 50,000 meters. It’s something within the reach of any Zwifter with enough perseverance (you don’t have to do it in one climb, after all!) but it can take a long time. Even Zwift authority and podcaster Simon Schofield famously has yet to earn his Tron bike (his co-hosts rib him in practically every episode over it, too!).
You get a Tron Bike! And you get a Tron Bike!
The Zwift Concept One bike is the ultimate Zwift bike, and therein lies the problem. Once you have it, you’ve essentially won the bike acquisition game, and then what are your drops for? I have literally millions of drops and counting, but nothing to spend them on.
Now, technically, there are bikes that do just a little better climbing, and a few others that do a bit better on the flats, but for an all-around bike, nothing is superior to the Tron Bike.
the Tron Bike, as it compares to other available bikes, in climbing and flat-road speed. See Zwift Insider’s analysis for full details.
And that is precisely the problem! The whole part of the game where you sweat to unlock enough levels and earn enough drops to level-up your bike is essentially short-circuited by the Tron Bike. Yes, I do have a bike for when all I’m doing is climbing the Alpe and another bike for pool-table flat routes (not to mention a mountain bike when I’m forced to go offroad) but most of the time I am riding on some kind of mix of flats and hills, and for that there may be other bikes that are arguably as good, but none clearly better than the Tron Bike.
Maybe this wouldn’t annoy me so much of the Tron Bike weren’t so boring. Yes, you get to pick the color of your wheels, but in reality there are only about five colors to choose from. Your bike has no water bottle, so you don’t get the drinking animation, nor do you get the standing animation on hills (only for sprints). When you’re in the draft, the Tron Bike rider doesn’t sit up like the riders of other road bikes, so it’s a little more difficult to know when you’re in the draft. In short the Tron Bike rider is the least-animated rider in the game. And it seems that a quarter of the riders in the game have a Tron Bike, sometimes I even lose track of which one I am in a peloton. As hard as it is to get this bike, it’s still too easy, and once you have it you have it forever.
Which one am I? Sometimes, in the events where we all wear the same jerseys, I have trouble telling which is me, which can be a drawback when sprinting.
(since I’m on the subject, I also have the Century Kit, which you are awarded after a 100 mile ride in Zwift. Again, a real pain to accomplish, and again more or less –in my opinion, anyway– the ultimate accomplishment as far as special kit goes. But it’s just basic black and, like the Tron Bike, that gets boring after a while. Ah, well.)
Make it hurt
Everyone who has a Tron Bike knows that when it comes to fitness, the rent is due every day. Sure, you can coast for a little while, but your fitness has to be re-earned on a regular basis. Maybe the same thing should be true for the Tron Bike. Maybe you need to climb a few thousand meters a month in order to keep the bike. Something. When somebody shows up with a Tron Bike, it should inspire shock and awe. It should be rare, it should be hard to get, and it should be hard to keep.
I don’t want to end the post on a down note, so let me close by saying that the Tron Bike is a cool piece of gear, no question about it. The first thing I did when I got mine is head to the volcano, because when you see that bad boy light up inside the lava caves, well, that is priceless.
If there is one thing that Zwifters using the Apple TV have been able to agree on, it’s the frustration of trying to use the horrible Apple TV remote with the Zwift interface. While I think part of the blame can be placed on Zwift for not being better able to optimize their app for the hardware available, the Apple TV remote’s touchpad is notoriously difficult to use (as anyone who has tried to enter a complex password into and Apple TV app will attest) and is nightmare for Zwifters.
Trying to switch bicycles in the middle of a ride using the Apple TV is excruciating. Here I am, with a heart rate north of 160, trying to calmly scroll just one bike down in the list — and scrolling down three instead. Back up one, back up three, down two… and all the while other riders passing you by as you sit at the side of the road in your misery.
The Olympic biathlon should consist of Zwifting and using an Apple TV remote. That is far more difficult than aiming a rifle after cross country skiing at top speed for a couple of miles.
Alternative Remotes to the Apple TV remote
The first remote I tried to replace my Apple TV remote was the Channelmaster CM7000-XRC remote, which I was attracted to because it has honest-to-goodness arrow keys instead of a touchpad. My kingdom for an arrow key!
Unfortunately, this remote did not work with Zwift, and had trouble with other apps on my Apple TV as well. Basically, any interface that didn’t have items lined up in a very neat grid (like the Home Screen) was just too hard to navigate with the Channelmaster.
The Real Problem
Now that the Apple TV remote isn’t a complete design disaster, there is only one thing between Zwifters and being able to actually navigate the Zwift menus, and that is the Zwift menu interface itself.
The problem with the interface is that the UI elements are often stacked one on top of another, and there is no clear way to signal that you (the user) want to interact with an element or go to the next one. For example, there are many scrollable elements (selecting a route, a pace partner, a workout) on the menu screen, and although you can scroll up and down through the list, there are also UI elements below (and often above) the list. It becomes frustratingly difficult to navigate the list without accidentally navigating to those other items. With the new remote, you can “click” the outside wheel to navigate, but in Zwift doing so always selects the next UI element, not the next item inside the UI element you are working in. If Zwift could organize the elements so that they are in a grid (which is how Apple’s own on-screen interfaces all work), working within their menus would be infinitely easier.
It is extremely difficult to scroll down this menu. Clicking the bottom of the scroll wheel doesn’t pick the next item in the list, rather it jumps down to the “Cancel” or “Next” buttons.
Siri Remote for Zwift?
I was very enthusiastic to see that Apple had redesigned the remote for the new Apple TV, and put in my Father’s Day request right away (Happy Father’s Day to you all, BTW). I’ve just tried out and here’s what I found.
[sad trombone sound effect]
Unfortunately, the “click wheel” arrow buttons on the Siri Remote do not allow me to scroll through menus in Zwift, which was the one thing I was desperately hoping for. You can scroll up and down using the wheel (basically, the edges of this new, round trackpad), but there’s no way to go “up one” or “down one”, which is what we really need. I haven’t tried it out while actually Zwifting yet, so I can’t say if it works better than the old remote, but I can tell you that it doesn’t do the thing I really was hoping it would do.
As a small consolation prize, it does seem like a much better thought-out device. It has a better shape, you can tell the top from the bottom without really examining it too closely (unlike the old remote, which gave you a 50-50 chance of picking it up with the touchpad on top), and seems better in nearly every way. I should also say that there isn’t anything about this new remote that seems to get in the way of Zwifting, so if you go this route at least you don’t have to have one remote for Zwift and another for all the rest.
It’s up to you, now, Zwift
OK, Zwift, the ball is in your court. Apple just redesigned their remote, and it’ll probably be years before they do it again. You are our best bet now. Please find some way to allow us to pick routes, change bikes, etc, without the agony of the touchpad! How about a closet in the Zwift garage where I can put all those bikes that I’m never going to ride (who needs more than three or four bikes in this game?), right next to the fifty jerseys I’m never going to wear?
It’s a great game, and it’s been great watching it evolve over the last couple of years, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been frustrating, too.
As it turns out, the most popular pages on this site are some posts I created a year or two back regarding the Peloton screen and what all the numbers on it mean. I thought it might be of interest to people if I created the same for Zwift, because there are many more overlays on the Zwift display, and they are also contextual — that is, they change depending on what you are doing in the game at the time.
Because this topic is so vast, I am going to have to build my post(s) out in stages, starting with the most common overlays and working my way toward the less common variations, including workout and racing. I’m committed to doing an update each week, but it may, in fact, be several weeks before I’m able to capture it all. Ever since I had the idea to document it all I’ve been mindful of how much data is actually on the screen and how often it changes, and the job gets bigger every time I look at it!
The top-center display: the basics
I might as well get into it, though, so here goes!
This is the display that is top-center of the screen, in its most basic form. If you are doing a workout or in a race you may see additional data (I’ll document later), but if you’re just riding around then this is your basic display, and contains all of the most basic information about you and your ride. The data shown above is always present in every mode of the game.
The blue number on the left (38kph in this case) is your speed. Whether it’s displayed in mph or kph depends on whether you’ve selected “imperial” or “metric” units in the preferences. (It is well known that Zwift points accumulate approximately 7% faster under the metric scheme, so that’s what most people use, even in the USA).
The black number in the center (14.1km) is the odometer, the total distance of the ride up to that point. It starts at zero and counts up as you ride.
The blue number to the right of the odometer (which reads 110m in the image above) is the amount of vertical climb traveled so far in the ride. This is displayed either in feet or in meters, depending on your choice in preferences.
The far right, black number in the white box (30:07) is the elapsed time of the ride. It is labeled “ET” for elapsed time.
Below this top row of numbers is an orange progress bar. This gives you a graphical representation of how far you have to go to get to the next level in Zwift. Generally (but not always) the distance between each level in Zwift is greater than the distance for the previous level, so one tends to advance more quickly early on and progressively more points are needed to advance as you progress through the levels.
Just below and left-justified with the orange progress bar is a bike icon and your current level (31 in this example). The blue number that is below and right justified with the orange progress bar is the number of “drops” you have accumulated. In this example, 3,041,516 drops are shown.
Briefly, drops are a sort of currency in Zwift, and you can spend them on new bike frames and wheels (other bike frames and wheels are awarded to you for certain accomplishments, such as completing the California, Italy, or Everest Challenges).
You can see to the right of the drops number a thumbs-up icon. That icon is only present for a few seconds after receiving a “ride-on” from another player. For those few seconds, you accrue drops at a slightly accelerated rate. There is also a mountain icon that you might see, which indicates that you are accruing drops faster due to riding on a relatively steep incline. And yes, you can be both riding an incline and receiving a ride-on at the same time. In that, case you will see the icons alternate for as long as they are in effect.
So, that’s the most basic display, and still it took several paragraphs! Let’s get into some of the contextual displays:
On a route
Here’s a display that is much like the basic Zwift display, but with some additional information at the bottom. You can see a progress bar and a checkered flag with a distance number (17.4km). This is how the main white box will look if you are riding a fixed-distance route, such as in a meet-up or event. The progress bar shows progress along the route (looks to be about 20% in this example) and the blue distance number is the distance remaining in the route. Since it’s the distance remaining, you’ll see it decrease as you ride. Ultimately, the blue bar will become completely filled in and the blue distance number will diminish to 0, and that will be the end of the fixed-distance route.
Basic display during timed segments
When you are approaching the end of a timed segment, the display changes to show more information about your performance during the timed segment. The top of the display is the same as usual, showing (l-r) speed (10mph), distance covered so far (15.5mi), height climbed so far (1525′), elapsed time (1 hour, 2 min, 23 seconds), a progress bar showing progress to the next level, the current level (17) and the current number of drops (672,306).
Next you’ll see two blue boxes. The left box is your own elapsed time through the timed segment (33:13.80 in this case). The right box is the time it took another rider to complete the segment. In the illustration, it shows me that D.Foley completed the segment in 33:22.95 and took 49th place for the segment. This tells me that I have approximately nine seconds to finish the segment to take 49th place from D.Foley. If I cannot complete the segment in less time than Foley, the right-hand blue box will show me the time of the 50th place finisher, and I can try to beat that. The right-hand box will cycle through all the finishers until I, myself, finish.
The bottom line on this display, from left to right, is the distance left to go in the segment (84 feet), an estimated time to complete the segment (33:19 – note that this is the estimated total time, not the estimated time remaining), and my own 30-day PR for the segment.
So, if everything went according to plan on this ride, I would have finished the segment six seconds after this screen shot was taken, finished in 49th place, and pushed D.Foley to the 50th spot. Of course, it ain’t over until it’s over, so you need to keep pushing until the finish line!
UPDATE: I had planned to make this a series of posts describing all of the overlays of the Zwift screen, but as I started gathering information about the next screen I was working on, I found that there already was a lot of good documentation available, on sites like ZwiftInsider and others for that reason, I think I will not continue to build out this set of posts. I might change my mind if Zwift adds new features without any good documentation, but for now I do not want to duplicate work that’s already been done.
If you’re a Zwifter, chances are that you’re running (or wish you were running) the Wahoo Kickr smart trainer. The Kickr, which is now in its fifth generation, may not be the absolute best trainer out there, but it is the established leader in the space, and when you’re dealing with a system such as Zwift that has components from so many different manufacturers involved, there is safety in numbers.
Photo from Wahoo showing the new parts (in black)
Competitors are always trying to find an edge, of course, and some of those competitors started to explore bikes that lean, something the Kickr does not do. Saris introduced the MP1 Nfinity Trainer platform, a $1200 boogie board for your bike, which I am going to try out as soon as $1200 doesn’t seem like a ton of money to me. (Attention Saris: I’m an influencer! Send me one of these!) Manufacturers like RealRyder and Bowflex have bikes that lean (though, notably, Wahoo’s own $3500 Kickr Bike doesn’t), and although those machines aren’t direct competitors to Wahoo’s Kickr, you have to imagine that all of these cycling products will converge over time and that market share matters.
I don’t have any insider information, but it certainly seems to me that Wahoo felt the need to respond to this trend, and their response comes in the form of AXIS Action Feet, a product whose very name seems like a desperate bid to generate excitement.
What are the Kickr AXIS Action Feet?
The biggest difference with the AXIS Action Feet are on the sides, where larger, thicker feet (shown attached to the Kickr replace the much smaller original feet.
The AXIS Action Feet are standard issue for the new Wahoo Kickr devices, and available as a retrofit for older models, at a not-insignificant price of about $80. Still, after one spends a couple grand on a bike and at least a thousand dollars for a Kickr setup, an additional eighty bucks might seem like a trivial amount to pay for an improvement in the experience. Still, eighty dollars is eighty dollars.
The AXIS Action Feet (I’ll just call them “Feet” with a capital “F” from now on) is a replacement set of feet for the Wahoo Kickr.
installing the Kickr AXIS Action Feet
Installation of the Feet is very simple, and can even be done without removing the bike from the trainer, if you’re lazy. Just push one of the Kickr arms back to the center and lay the whole assembly on its side. You might get a bit of grease on your fingers but it’s not a dirty job.
The front and back replacement feet require a Phillips screwdriver. The side Feet just screw in. The blue aluminum retainer is a stock piece and you can just swap them over to the new feet. Installation is a ten minute job, and there is very low risk of damaging anything or injuring yourself, as long as you’re careful.
The difference between Action Feet and the stock feet
The front replacement foot (seen attached to the Kickr) is much beefier than the stock foot, but functionally isn’t really any different.
Two of the feet are along the centerline of the bike and are basically needed only because the other two feet, the ones that are attached to the arms, are taller requiring the centerline feet to be taller as well. So, the forward and aft centerline feet aren’t very remarkable, they’re just slightly beefier versions of the stock feet.
The only Feet in a position to make any difference (literally and figuratively) are the two Feet attached to the stabilizing arms of the Kickr. These replacement Feet are, as you can see from the photo above, considerably beefier than the ones they replace. They are also bigger in surface area, so they will perhaps help a bit in keeping your Kickr from sinking into the carpet or your mat. As with the stock feet, you can height-adjust the two “side Feet” to level the bike.
Do the Wahoo Kickr AXIS Action Feet make a difference?
Answer: No.
Oops. That’s far too short an answer considering I’m making a whole blog post out of this topic, so I’d better elaborate, and maybe provide some caveats.
I’ll start with the caveats. One is that I didn’t perceive a noticeable difference, and that doesn’t mean you won’t. Second, my bike is on top of a thin mat which itself is on top of a reasonably thick carpet. I think that if the bike were directly on a cement slab, then maybe I’d have a better chance of detecting a difference. As it is, I really don’t think I can tell the difference.
The rear foot (seen installed on the Kickr) is, like the front foot, pretty much just a spacer lift the trainer a bit to accommodate the thicker side feet.
The Action Feet ride experience
As I said, in my experience, the experience of riding with the Feet isn’t noticeably different from the experience of riding with the stock feet, but I don’t know if altering the feet of the Kickr ever really had a chance of success. The front of the bike is not anchored at all, of course, so when I am really mashing the pedals for a stiff uphill (which is where I think one would see the most side-to-side stress), the sensation of having the front of the bike relatively free and the back of the bike much more rigidly fixed is very unnatural. It’s not as though Wahoo could have made this product much better and didn’t, this type of trainer architecture just seems to have this limitation that the back end of the bike is sort of anchored to the floor while the front is free to move, and I don’t see how one can really get around that.
Unless you have the Saris trainer platform, maybe. That thing seems prohibitively expensive to me, but it’s very existence suggests that the engineers over at Saris recognize this problem with the trainer architecture and are betting company R&D money that the best way to fix it is to put the entire assembly on top of a movable platform.
The Saris training platform retails for $1,200. If you save money by not buying the Kickr AXIS Action Feet, then that cost is a mere $1,120, which still feels a lot like twelve hundred dollars.
Which is harder, a 100-mile century ride on the road or a 100-mile century ride in Zwift? Is zwift harder than riding outside? Riding 100 miles isn’t particularly easy even under the best circumstances, and involve many hours of cycling, but there’s definitely a difference between Zwift and riding outside. Having done both, I thought a quick comparison might be of interest to someone who has done one and is contemplating the other. This isn’t a scientific comparison, and I don’t claim that I’m an authority on Century rides, but I think maybe I can provide some insights…
The Road Century
For me, at my level of fitness and in the moderately hilly area I live in, a road century is about a seven-hour affair, when rest stops are factored in. I wrote about my first and second centuries in this blog, and I found the experience to be fairly similar in both. I was better prepared for the first one, but the second was easier, and in the end they both felt like they took more or less the same effort. Anyway, please check out those blog entries if you haven’t done a road Century and want to hear a little more about that experience.
The Zwift Century
The Zwift platform (along with technologies such as the Wahoo Kickr and Climb) does a lot to bridge the gap between riding on, say, rollers and riding outdoors. It’s certainly not the same experience, though, and after having done a metric century on Zwift, I was curious to see what the full Century experience would be like.
Well, when I said I was curious, I mean I was curious in the sense of “I wonder what that would be like?”, not in the sense that I really planned to find out. Still, as a completionist, that black Zwift jersey —exclusive to those who’ve done a 100 mile ride— did beckon to me. Then again, I knew that even if it was easier it was still going to be several hours on the trainer, and that part wasn’t terribly enticing.
Finally, fate intervened, and the indoor Century plan was back on. The Main Line Animal Rescue bike event went “virtual” this year (2020), and they moved it up to June to boot. Although this is the event for which I do all of my fundraising, I have to admit that this year I nearly sat it out. I was getting tired of all of the usual outdoor events being canceled or converting to “virtual” events (“virtual” basically means “do whatever you want to do”), and with the local bike club canceling their group rides I was really having trouble finding any motivation.
There was about a week to go before the event when I realized that if I did take a pass this time, I would certainly regret it when October rolled around and there wasn’t a big bike event fundraiser for me to get involved in. After all, the dogs and cats still needed care, and with so many people out of work and/or afraid to leave their homes, it hasn’t been a great year for fundraising in general. So although I usually spend a couple of months fundraising, this time I had a week and I had to figure out what to do as my virtual event.
My first thought was to do a Century ride in Zwift, mostly because it seemed like a kooky idea that would appeal to donors and also felt like the sort of thing that wasn’t really as hard as it sounds. And I hadn’t really trained for this, so I was definitely looking for something that wasn’t as hard as it sounds!
Back to Fuego Flats
At the risk of suffering an even greater level of boredom than I experienced in my metric century, I decided that my 100-miler would be done on a route called “Tempus Fugit” in the Fuego Flats area of Watopia, Zwift’s main bicycling paradise. Fuego Flats is, like it sounds, just about completely flat, with grades ranging from -1% to 2%. There are no stop signs, no stop lights, no traffic (except other bicycles and runners that you cannot collide with) and no weather except the weather in my basement. This should be just about optimal for a long ride.
Unlike the metric Century Zwift ride, I opted not for the TT bike but for my regular (Zwift) bike, the Trek Madone with the Zipp 808 wheels. My thinking was that on a Sunday morning (particularly with most of the world still in pandemic lockdown and riding indoors) there would be a lot of other cyclists on the route and it wouldn’t be so hard to find another person or two to draft off of. Also, since the TT bike does not benefit from the draft and you cannot crash into other bikes, when you’re riding the TT bike the others on the road are completely irrelevant, and that was just a little more boring than I was ready to deal with. I am not entirely sure whether riding a TT bike or a bike like the Madone in the draft is faster, but did try a little experiment in the week leading up to this ride and I believe the regular bike in the draft is faster.
As it turns out, on the day of the event I got even more help than anticipated. My brother joined me on the ride and rode the first segment (the first forty miles) as my domestique, so I always had someone to draft off of. That was, predictably, my fastest segment, averaging somewhere between 23-24 mph. Nowhere in the real world have I ever gone that fast for that long. I’ve never had the opportunity to cycle in a Fuego Flats type of environment with people to draft off the whole way, so I have no way of knowing whether I’d be able to pull off speeds like that in the real world, but suffice to say this seemed like pretty much ideal circumstances.
Speed and output for the Tour of My Basement
I took a ten minute break at the 40 mile mark, where I lost my domestique (strangely, he had other things to do that day than sit in his own basement and spin, but I thank him greatly for the help). I re-started much the same as I had left off, but to stave off boredom I started watching one of the ESPN 30 for 30’s (the Lance Armstrong one, naturally. Spoiler alert: this guy has no self-awareness). Since I couldn’t watch TV and try to find people to draft off I switched then to the TT bike for the remainder of the ride. Slower than the Madone had been, but probably faster in clean air. You can see from the chart that my speed drops off noticeably after the 40 mile mark, but I can’t really say how much of that is aero and how much of that is just good old fatigue.
The Mile 70 Wall
I have noticed that on each of the Century rides I’ve done there’s a psychological barrier at the 70 mile mark. Miles 70-80 are the worst, and although I am not entirely sure why that is I suppose it is because at that point I’ve been riding long enough to be feeling sore, but I’m not close enough to the end to start focusing on my post-ride meal(s).
Just like the outdoor centuries, the mile 70 wall was still a thing. I didn’t really contemplate quitting as I have done before, but it is definitely the psychological low point of the ride. I had decided on breaks at 40, 70, and 90 miles (and I was happy later with those choices) to give myself a little break before the stretch at 70 miles, and I’m happy I did. I grabbed myself a bread roll and started rationing my Bloks. I had one GU left over for this ride, but it was one of the chocolate outrage ones, and those things are like candy and best saved for the end of a ride.
The break at mile 90 was similar to the last rest stops on my outdoor Centuries, just long enough to reset. At that point in a ride, it’s pretty hard to get re-started, so you don’t want the break to be too long. Plus, at that point you’re only 10 miles from the end, and I was definitely ready to be done.
As the graph shows, I was gradually slowing down. This ride is a little over 9 laps of Tempus Fugit, I think, and Zwift gives you a time for the lap (1/2 lap, actually) so I was quite aware during the ride that my last few laps were each about 2-3% slower than the one before. I was slowly running out of gas. Additionally, although the grade on the route only varies between -1% and 2%, at this point in the ride I didn’t even have to see the screen to know what the gradient was. When I hit the 2% section I thought to myself “oh, no, the hill again!”
But then, with fairly little fanfare (just the banner announcing that I’d gotten the badge for the hundred mile ride, which Zwift calls the “No Big Deal” badge), it was over.
So, now the question you’ve been waiting to be answered…
Is riding a Century in Zwift harder or easier than riding a Century outside on the road?
Based on my limited experience, I’d have to say it was easier. Definitely easier, and for one major reason: because there are no stop signs, stop lights, blind corners, traffic, or any other reason why you’d need to stop, your average speed in Zwift will be way faster than anything you could achieve on normal roads. In fact, my time for the “Tour de Mon Sous-Sol” as I call it was more than an hour faster than my fastest outdoor Century. After five plus hours on the bike doing this, I was very happy to not have to ride for another hour or more. Plus, my ride was climate controlled and I had complete discretion over the rest stops, etc. (and my wife came down every now and then to take photos for our social media posts — this was a fundraiser, after all!)
All of that said, if I were properly trained up I think I would pick the outdoor Century every time. The indoor ride was boring, and I don’t think it would have been significantly less boring if I hadn’t chosen to do 8 or 9 laps of Tempus Fugit. Outdoors there is scenery, navigational challenges to exercise your mind, comraderie, all the things that make cycling fun. Plus, this indoor century was almost completely in the saddle, and it is considerably less comfortable than the variability you get when riding outside. (I’ve spoken in earlier posts about the way the bike is clamped to the trainer and the unnatural feeling that results.) I’m very happy to be a Zwifter, but it’s still second best to riding outdoors.
Final Thoughts after the Zwift Century
In the end, I raised $1060 for Main Line Animal Rescue, which I was super-excited about. I even had donors who found the fundraiser through this blog! It’s a great feeling to be able to help out the dogs and cats of MLAR, so on that account alone it was definitely worth it.
Plus, I now have the coveted black Zwift jersey. My avatar is never going to take it off.
This morning I decided that the time had come to snag that cool gray jersey that Zwift awards you when you do a 100km ride. Here’s how I went about it.
Before I start, let me be clear that this post is not about preparing for a metric century in Zwift … you can prepare for it just the same way you’d prepare for an on-the-road MC. I’ll talk a bit about the difference between the “real” metric century and the Zwift version, but as far as preparation I think there are a lot of resources out there to get you prepared (including Zwift’s own Fondo training courses). This post is about the decisions I made about how to approach it in-game, and the experience of actually doing it.
I’m a 100 mile/week rider (if you count the Peloton in there) and have done a few centuries, both the metric and full 100-milers. I’d started a couple of Zwift rides in the past intending to go 100km, but for one reason or another I never actually went the distance. With the local weather somehow locked into a cold, rainy pattern for the past few weeks and not a whole lot to do at home during the lockdown, I decided that today would be the day.
The easy way or the fun way?
I had considered two strategies for tackling the MC in Zwift. One was to pick a longish course such as the Uber Pretzel and just ride it. That was how I had started my last 100k attempt, but after I saw how long it took me to do the first 30k or so I bailed out, figuring it’d take most of the day to do the rest. I am not entirely sure how long it would take me to do that ride… there’s a fair bit of climbing, but in the real world if you begin and end a ride in the same place the ascents and descents are literally equal so the extra effort going up is rewarded by rest coming down. I’m not sure that the same can be said for Zwift. I never really seem to coast through sections like Titan’s grove the way I can through similarly hilly areas near my home. I feel like Zwift cheats me on the downhills… not a big deal since I’m on the thing to train, but still I don’t think the ascents and descents cancel each other out on Zwift nearly as much as they do in real life.
The other approach to doing 100k, the one I chose, was to set things up for myself so that I could complete the 100k as quickly as possible. So the course I chose was Tempus Fugit, the flattest, fastest route in Watopia, and a favorite of people who just want to maximize their MPH (or KPH, as the case may be). 100k on Tempus Fugit has only about 500 feet of climb.
After selecting the course I had to decide on the bike, and I had a conundrum. Should I pick a TT bike for its aero, or should I pick a fast road bike and rely on the draft? You may be aware that in Zwift, you get no aero advantage from drafting behind other riders (they may draft you but you can’t draft them). So if you go TT you’re on your own. With other bikes, you can take advantage of a healthy aero boost when drafting behind a rider (and even more if the group is four or more riders), but that means that others dictate your pace to some extent. Today, being quarantine day #1zillion, there were so many riders on Fuego Flats it was, as they say, a conga line. Finding drafting partners would not be a problem.
After some thought and fruitless googling, I decided to go the TT route, just to simplify things. I selected the Cervélo P5 for the ride. Why that bike? It happened to be in my garage. It was probably the best bike I could afford the last time I did a TT ride and considering how few TT rides I do I wasn’t going to buy another just for this. So the P5 it is.
Getting ready
Although I generally don’t like to eat before a bike ride, most of my Zwift rides are an hour or less so it hardly matters. For what was fixing to be a 3+ hour ride, I was going to need some fuel, so I made myself a breakfast of oatmeal and an orange, and was ready to go. (NB: I am very far from being a sports nutritionist, but this worked for me).
Riding Fuego Flats on a TT bike is just about as dull as Zwift can get. Fuego Flats is, as the name would suggest, pool-table flat, with gradients between -1° and 2°. It’s so monotonous that I could actually feel the one degree changes in gradient, which normally are imperceptible. Add to that that the TT bike cannot draft behind others, and you pretty much can completely ignore the other riders. After all, you can’t crash into them, and you can’t draft off them, so it really doesn’t matter where they are. Riding alone or in a pack of a hundred riders, it’s exactly the same experience. Pick a gear, grind out the miles, and that’s about it. I chose a 33-34 kph pace so I could finish in three hours and settled in.
I took a break around the 50k mark. Just like in real life, I’m looking for a bio-break after about hour #1. I decided to hold out until I was past mid-way, because I wanted to have more behind me than ahead of me when I got back on the bike. I grabbed a bread roll (it was the only thing I could see in there that I could eat while on the bike) and got started again before I got too comfortable not pedaling.
Around the 80k mark, I opened up a pack of Gu. I’m not really into snacking on my ride, but it may just be that I don’t know what I’m doing. I did notice that my time on “Fuego Flats Reverse” seemed to drop about 2-3% each time through, so I was definitely running out of gas. Would the right snacks help? I really don’t know. I do like Gu, though, it’s like candy. My favorite flavor is Chocolate Outrage, but if you’re actually in the middle of a big ride it’s a little hard to get down, so I generally go for the salted caramel. (In case you’re wondering, I am not compensated by Gu for this mention, though at about $1 per gel, I certainly wouldn’t mind them throwing some free product my way)
The 100k mark came and went without a whole lot of fanfare. There was the usual blue banner saying that I’d gotten the badge, followed by the orange banner saying that I unlocked the Metric Century jersey (the whole reason I was doing this, to tell the truth). I was getting close to finishing the timed Fuego Flats Reverse, so I went ahead and finished that. Then I was close to getting 105 km, so I did that, too. (If it weren’t for completionism, I’d probably have half as many Zwift miles as I do!)
Final thoughts
So, after all that, how does a Zwift metric century compare to the real thing? I suppose in terms of effort, it was about the same. I live in a fairly hilly area, so the metric centuries I have done have usually had 3-4000 feet of climb to them, which both requires extra effort at times but also provides some relief. I’ve never just sat and cranked out three hours at a constant pace, and it’s hard to compare.
I think I found it a little less comfortable doing a distance ride on the trainer because the trainer has the bike more or less locked in place. On the road, the bike can sway just a little from side to side as you pedal. That’s particularly noticeable on hills but you still feel it on the flats as well. The trainer doesn’t give you the same jinba ittai that you get on the road, which is a shame. I am not sure I ever plan to do a full 100 mile century ride indoors for just that reason. Then again, if it doesn’t warm up soon around here I will probably be looking for new things to try.
One other thought: if you’re doing an organized event, then the rest stops are set at intervals of the organizer’s choosing, but of course on Zwift you’re making that decision for yourself (assuming you’re not in a group ride), and that may change things a little bit.
In summary, I think I can safely say that if you have completed a metric century in either Zwift or the real world, you probably wouldn’t have trouble doing one in the other. Jumping on your TT bike and heading for Fuego Flats is probably the fastest way to get in your 100k, but exciting it is not.
For your indoor-riding money, which is better: Peloton or Zwift? I have both, and although Peloton riders and Zwift riders each have more or less the same goal of getting a good cycling workout, they almost could not be more different. After about 1,000 Peloton rides (just about every day for a couple of years), I switched entirely over to Zwift a few months ago, but am now splitting my time between the two. I’ll explain why…
The author, riding the Peloton bike with a broken arm and multiple broken ribs. The Peloton bike is heavy and stable, more so than my Zwift setup, and it’s pretty hard to crash when you’re riding indoors!
The Peloton Experience
For this comparison, I am going to by relying on my own history with both the Peloton bike and the Zwift experience, and talk about the pros and cons of each. You’ll see that sometimes the comparisons are apples-to-oranges (after all, one is hardware with streaming content and the other is an app to which you bring your own interface) but I think it is possible to make some valid comparison since at the end of the day it’s all variations on indoor cycling / spinning.
My Introduction to the Peloton Bike
I bought my Peloton bike a couple of years ago after hearing my brother go on and on about how the Peloton had improved his fitness. It was hard to miss that he’d lost 70 pounds in the year he’d owned it, and that summer when members of our extended family climbed Mt. Mansfield he certainly did seem to be up to the task (we rewarded him by making him carry the backpack). Even so, my friends who know me as a cheerleader for the bike that goes nowhere might be surprised to learn that I left my first visit to the showroom unimpressed.
In August of 2017, my wife and I went to our local Peloton showroom (yeah, we live in a place like that) where we got to sample the bike. The salesperson showed me that you watch the class on the screen and turn the resistance knob when the instructor tells you.
“If the bike knows the resistance should go up, why do I have to turn the knob?” I asked. This was a dumb bike. Nicely made, and super smooth action (thanks to a drive belt instead of a chain), but just plain dumb.
Eager to please, she showed me a feature called “just ride” that featured beautiful movies of rides on trails and roads that I could just follow, bringing my own soundtrack if I wanted to. “So, if the road goes uphill in the movie, does the ride get harder?” I asked. “No,” she replied. The fact is, the experience on the bike has nothing to do with what you see on the screen. Again, dumb.
My wife and I left without buying a bike. I am not sure exactly how she felt about it at the time, but I was disappointed. I wanted a bike I could ride in the winter, and this didn’t seem to be it. I had never taken a spin class and wasn’t all that enthusiastic to, either. And, for all the hype, the Peloton experience is just a spin class beamed to you over the Internet. I mean, let’s keep some perspective.
The Peloton is not a biking simulator
Over the next few days, I actually found myself starting to reconsider my first impression. I had been disappointed in the Peloton bike because wasn’t the indoor bike simulator I wanted, but then again, it wasn’t trying to be. I realized on reflection that a big factor in my disappointment was my expectations and not anything to do with the bike itself. The following weekend, my wife and I went back to take a sample class on the bike.
This time, I started to think of the Peloton as a training tool, a piece of equipment that could make me a better cyclist not though a true simulation, but by focusing on very specific elements of the experience, namely building up my cardiovascular endurance and my leg muscles. The Peloton bike is a direct-drive setup (like a fixie) and there is no coasting on the Peloton — something that took some getting used to… I felt like George Jetson on the treadmill sometimes! With no coasting, there really isn’t any “downhill” on the Peloton, either. You can lighten up the resistance to next to nothing, but you are still spinning even when your are in so-called “active recovery,” which is the closest thing to rest that you’re ever going to get as long as class is in session.
This is what happens when you coast on your Peloton bike.
Given how happy I am with my Peloton bike today it’s funny to think that purchasing it was such a close call. Even after the second visit, I was still on the fence. After all, start-up cost for the bike was north of $2,500, and I’d pretty much agonize over that sort of spend if I didn’t end up using it. My wife seemed interested, though, and in the end each of us rationalized the purchase by telling ourselves that we were doing it for the other.
Does the Peloton really work?
Yes. Yes it does. You have to actually ride it, though. Get yourself on a schedule where you’re doing, say, three or four 45 minute rides a week and I can’t imagine how you won’t see a difference. And cycling is one of the lowest-impact exercises there is, so if you’ve got the motivation you can do it every day.
On the topic of the Peloton’s effectiveness, I’d say that for building cardiovascular fitness it’s probably even better than actual cycling out on the road. On the Peloton, there really is no downhill-as I mentioned before there is no coasting. You also don’t ever need to stop for traffic lights or stop signs or anything like that. It is one continuous workout. In fact, the only way I’d say the Peloton bike was easier than the road bike is that on the Peloton you choose your own resistance and can increase or decrease it at any time, whereas on the road bike the hills are what they are, and although you get to select your gearing you still have to get up the hills on your route.
So, if you love your Peloton, why did you pony up for a Zwift setup?
After about two years riding (generally daily) on the Peloton, I was starting to wonder if there might be more in life. We had a couple of great years, and at the end of it I was in excellent shape, maybe twenty pounds lighter, and able to keep up with riders half my age (and drop them on the hills — priceless!). The Peloton is a low-impact exercise and it’s something you can do every day, and I really couldn’t ask for more. Still, I had started seeing the Zwift demo bikes set up in the bike shop and was being bombarded constantly on YouTube by Zwift ads, and I started to think, “it really would be fun to actually do a bike riding / racing simulator.”
I didn’t take the plunge right away. After all, although I owned a road bike I didn’t have the other equipment needed to get started. For the uninitiated, it’s important to know that Zwift is an internet service / app(s), and not a hardware/software/service combination the way Peloton is. The hardware component of Zwift is BYO, and the cost can be significant, particularly if you don’t have a bike. (On the other hand, if you do have a bike some Zwift setups can be relatively inexpensive.)
Since I didn’t already have an indoor trainer, I used Zwift’s website for guidance and settled on a Wahoo Kickr / Wahoo Climb combo. I already had an Apple TV and (as I mentioned) a bike, so I wouldn’t have to purchase anything else, but the Wahoo gear ran north of $1500 all by itself. Zwift is a subscription service with a monthly fee, too, so if depending on what equipment you have already the Zwift experience cost can rival that of the Peloton (though over time the much higher Peloton subscription cost will make a big difference). Setting up Zwift wasn’t too difficult, but unfortunately that is only half the battle in this case, because the trainer itself needs to be set up. Getting my bike connected to the Wahoo (I bought the wheel-off model) and dialed in took a fair amount of time, so advantage Peloton in the “getting started” matchup.
Closer, but still not a perfect simulator
Heading to the top of Mt. Zwift on a climb known as the “Epic KOM”. A mountain goat greets you at the finish line.
Although I enjoy the Zwift very much, it is sadly not a perfect bicycling simulator, either. Now, I’m aware that most of the shortcomings I’m about to detail have to do with the (Wahoo) hardware and not the Zwift program, exactly. But you can’t Zwift without hardware, and I’m using what seems to be their preferred setup, so at the end of the day I don’t think it’s really off the mark to call these things issues with Zwift.
The first shortcoming that becomes obvious is that there is no braking in Zwift. I think there’s a keyboard key for slowing down, but practically speaking there’s no braking. That’s not nearly as big a problem in the virtual world as it would be in the real one, because Zwift has no collision detection so there is no chance of colliding with your fellow riders or obstacles, and there is no chance of you not being able to make a corner due to excessive speed. Still, drafting is a thing in Zwift (and some opine that it’s an even greater force there than IRL) and it can be tricky to tuck in behind another rider when you can’t actually tap the brakes. Complicating things is the subtle latency between the trainer and the app, and positioning yourself for drafting becomes an art form.
Along the same lines there is no steering in Zwift. You can make route-level decisions such as turning left to go to the volcano or turning right to climb a mountain, but that’s as far as that goes. As I mentioned, there are no collisions in Zwift, so you don’t have to worry about steering all that much (in fact, sitting in the middle of a pack of fifty riders is no big deal in Zwift!) but as Zwift is trying to expand into dirt and gravel simulations, the lack of steering is a barrier to having any sort of technical riding. For road riding, I don’t find it a big deal.
Another shortcoming, and the one I still notice on a daily basis, is that the feel of the bike isn’t the same, particularly when pedaling hard. Because my bike is locked into the trainer, it has none of the natural rocking from side to side that is part of pedaling. This isn’t so noticeable at pace speed, but when sprinting or climbing it feels very restrictive.
Speaking of climbing, that, too, is somewhat unnatural. While I appreciate the Climb’s ability to raise the front fork of my bike to change the geometry for climbing, if I get out of the saddle to make it up a particularly steep grade the whole assembly gets to be a bit unbalanced, and sometimes the rear end lifts a little. It’s not terrible, but it’s not “normal”, either, and inhibits all-out efforts at climbing.
As I said before, these things could easily be called shortcomings of the trainer rather than of Zwift, but since they’re part of the Zwift experience I think it’s fair to include them. Wahoo has recently released their own Wahoo bike (which, at over $3000, is more expensive than my road bike!) and Saris (among other companies) have introduced wooden “bike surfboards” to allow for more natural motion, so it’s clear that the issues are known and people are hard at work trying to find solutions. Indeed, it seems to be a badly kept secret that Zwift is working on it’s own trainers, if for no other reason than to standardize a feature set. As of this writing, though, there is still work to do.
So, with those gripes out the way I have to say that I do love riding on Zwift. It doesn’t take the place of riding outdoors, but it’s a fun diversion. Zwift races are fun, and Zwift group rides (which everyone just understands are races, too) are great. I even did a “meetup” with about a half-dozen of friends from the cycling club and we ran one of the courses together (using discord to chat). It’s a great way to spend a couple of hours, and I am very much looking forward to seeing the platform grow over time.
Even though I’m really enjoying Zwifting, that doesn’t mean I’ve turned my back on the Peloton. In fact, in recent weeks I’ve been spending even more time on the Peloton than on the Zwift. I’ll explain below…
Why Zwift is better than Peloton
Zwift is more fun. I think I can say that without reservation. On Zwift you climb mountains (including a faithful reproduction of the Alpe D’Huez, which is close to an hour and half of unremitting uphill), ride underwater (through a see-thru tunnel, though I suppose in the game even that isn’t needed), past dinosaurs and volcanos. There is visual interest in the landscape, and it doesn’t get boring any more than your local outdoor rides do.
The summit of the Alpe du Zwift. There is nothing on the Peloton as satisfying as reaching the top of a Zwift mountain.
I also think that I work a bit harder in Zwift. On the Peloton, I may be asked to pedal for thirty more seconds at a high resistance, but on the Zwift I know I’m pedaling hard because I’m near the top of a hill — I can even see the mountain goats hanging out at the summit. On the Peloton, I may be chasing the person above me on the leaderboard, but it’s really just by following a number (the number of kilojoules they’ve output as compared with me) which is dry to say the least. In fact, Peloton very deliberately de-emphasizes competition while in Zwift even the group rides are races. And when you’re chasing someone in Zwift you literally see them up the road, and you can viscerally feel the gap closing or widening. Dropping a friend in Zwift is every bit as satisfying as dropping them in the real world.
So, if Zwift is more fun and I get a better workout, why ever go back to the Peloton? Well, Peloton does have its own strengths.
Why Peloton is better than Zwift
I find the consistency of the Peloton workouts to be an advantage. Although there are different types of rides (tabata, hills, intervals, etc), one forty-five minute class seems to me to be much like another, so I can compare outputs and distances across rides much more evenly. By contrast, on the Zwift, I might be trying to compare a thirty-minute climb of Mt. Zwift this week to an hour on the desert flats last week and really have no idea how they match up. On the Peloton bike, I find that the consistency of the challenge makes it easier for me to gauge my efforts and to track my progress.
I also find the Peloton experience a bit more civilized than the Zwift experience. Of course, my choice of bike and Wahoo trainer is not Zwift’s doing, but since I’m using the preferred setup I think a comparison can be made. The Peloton bike is heavy and sturdy, easily adjustable for things like seat height and handlebar height, and nearly silent in operation due to its belt-driven mechanism. By contrast, my Zwift setup seems exceedingly cramped and noisy. It’s my own bike that I selected and set up, so you’d think that’d be perfect for me, but because it is clamped into the Wahoo trainer it feels unnaturally rigid. The chain and derailleurs are considerably more noisy than the Peloton’s belt, and that noise is amplified by the indoor setting — I never thought of the bike as noisy when it was outdoors.
Another big advantage that the Peloton has over the Zwift is that there is less involved at the start of each workout. Even if I have to adjust the bike after my wife’s used it (sharing a bike is not really even an option in the Zwift world unless both riders are exactly the same size) I can jump on the bike and be ready to start a workout within a minute or so. With Zwift I need to turn on the TV, turn on the Apple TV, choose the Zwift app, launch the Zwift companion on my phone (because of the limited Bluetooth connections on the Apple TV), start my Kickr and Climb, pair the bike to the companion app, and choose a ride using the horrible Apple TV remote (which is a lot like dialing your phone from five feet away using a pool cue). It takes several minutes. And, because every Zwift “event” is a race, I’d better be good and warmed up well before the official start! What it all comes down to is that when I have limited time it is far easier for me to grab my chest strap and my shoes and jump on the Peloton. Sometimes, there is something to be said for freedom from choice.
So, Peloton or Zwift?
Not many people are going to want to invest in both Peloton and Zwift. After all, you are getting the same sort of exercise with each, and you obviously can’t ride both at the same time. I’m going to answer this question with an “it depends”, which feels like a bit of a cop-out, but I’ll try to explain myself.
The Pelotoner wants to work out. It’s a pure workout machine. It may not be as much fun as the Zwift, but there is an enthusiastic instructor and (hopefully) good music, and as long as you challenge yourself you can get the best bang for your buck for the time you have to spend riding.
The Zwifter is the cyclist, who is driven indoors either by weather or expediency. The workouts are quite varied, and some can be much more challenging than a typical Peloton class (and Zwift does have a “workout” mode with intervals pegged to different power zones), but it’s a little more difficult to do a Zwift workout if you have a hard stop at the other end (most Zwift rides are distance-bound, rather than time-bound).
So, if I had to choose, which one would be my pick? Because I ride outdoors during the season (and whenever I can), I think I’d pick the Peloton. It helps me maintain my fitness, and because the classes are all time-bound I can more easily fit the workout into my schedule. If, for some reason, I somehow found myself unable ride in the real world (which is what got me into all this in the first place), I’d pick the Zwift as the platform that can hold my interest better.
Final Thoughts
After I finished this blog post, I realized that there was one angle I really hadn’t discussed, and that is, which of these two platforms can best simulate the other? The answer, I think, is clearly Zwift. There is a training mode in Zwift which lays outs an exercise plan based on power zones, just like the Peloton Power Zone rides. There is an FTP test and then the zones are used for the training courses. In fact, the Zwift training courses have a cool feature where, if you are doing a multiple-workout course, after finishing one the next might not be available for a day or two, forcing you to rest (or at least encouraging it). There is also a limit to how long you can wait to do the next workout, so not only do you have to rest but you can’t rest too long and still complete the course as it’s prescribed.
By contrast, the Peloton doesn’t have anything that really simulates an actual bike ride, and because it’s up to you to set the resistance, it never will. It’s just not baked into the DNA. I am still a big Peloton fan, but the fact is it rather unapologetically does just one thing. If that one thing is the one thing you want, then there’s your answer to whether Peloton or Zwift is the right pick.
