Zwiftcruiser

  In order to give a slightly less unappealing appearance... I mean the blog appearance, I have given up on being a crowd pleaser... I moved all the current content to a new blog space. This address will not be updated anymore. All new content will be published on the new address. And you can find it here: https://zwiftcruiser.himlen.net/

Haha, what a disgusting race! Almost as disgusting as this year's Tour de France. It turns out my previous race, my first licensed cheater race, although within W/kg limits still brought up my 90 day average to 2.503 W/kg, just a smidgeon above the ZP limit, meaning I got back into cat C overnight. Doh! Now I have to wait until the end of month to get rid of an over-limits result from 1 July before I can cheat again and get away with it. I will still cheat though. I just won't get away with it on ZP until then. I felt I wanted to try hit the Betas again. If you haven't tried the Betas yourself, then I can explain. There are Zwift HQ crit races, many laps around a short downtown track. They come in two forms. The normal crits and the Beta version. The normal crits are essentially a bunch of cheaters going round round like a carousel. In the Betas Zwift is experimenting with adding foolproof protection against cheaters. People trying to sandbag are awarded a green condom abov...

With a shiny new license to cheat from ZwiftPower and with strong assurances from Zwift that the license is not going to get revoked, I quote, "anytime soon", I am of course eager to get started. I have been waiting for this moment for some time. As Fortune would have it, however, I ended up in an unusually tricky first race for a ZP approved cruiser. As I clicked Save after the race I had literally no idea of how I was doing. Well, you never do as a cruiser, or even as a legit racer in the lower cats, thanks to the Zwift and ZwiftPower race rules, but this was worse than usual. I could see four different scenarios before me.  It might have been a DQ It might have been gold It might have been silver It might have been sixth With the downgrade to "D almost C" and with two weeks left before a nasty 2.64 W/kg in my 90 day average on ZP is washed away, I was scared I would go over limits slightly already in my first race, which I couldn't afford just yet. Later, at ...

Discovery 1:   Discovery 2: FUCK YEAH! SHOWTIME!

The heavy rider's disadvantage You couldn't exactly call it unfair perhaps, but heavy riders suffer a disadvantage in Zwift races. The lighter riders have an easier time uphill and it is so hard to match the Watts needed to keep level with the lighter rider's W/kg there.  The above is a very common complaint on various Zwift forums. But is it true? I like to question those self-evident truths we all take for granted. If they are indeed truths then there is no harm in validating them. Sometimes, however, they turn out not to be true after all, once you actually take a serious look at them. So what about rider weight and race results in Zwift? Let's take one of those serious looks for a change instead of just passing on what some other guy said on the internet. The below is partly based on a discussion I was involved in on the official Zwift forum recently centered around what I like to call the Light Rider's Curse. The light rider's advantage Without any prior kn...

The Zwift W/kg category system needs to go. We have talked about it before. A few times. But it is important to understand that the reason why the W/kg cat system is so terribad is not just that it allows for and incites cheating in the forms of sandbagging and cruising. It also does a lot of other stupid things to Zwift racing. In this and the next blog post we are going to discuss two of those things. I have dubbed them the Sprint Race Catapult and the Light Rider's Curse. First up is the Sprint Race Catapult. No, it's not an instruction on how to get yourself catapulted over the finish line in race sprints. It's a complaint over how sprint races tend to catapult you into a category where you don't really belong because of how the W/kg cat system works. A few posts ago I discussed the power curve. Let's go over it quickly again. A power curve looks something like this. No two riders' power curves are exactly the same but all power curves are more or less the s...

Sick again. Can't train, can't cheat. And it makes no difference whatsoever. In my absence thousands of others are keeping up the struggle, cheating indiscriminately in race categories B through D, whatever their underlying intent is (it absolutely doesn't matter anyway). And you should be one of them.   This is a call to arms. I just have to sell you the story first... Why on earth would you want to be a superhero like me, gloriously crushing cat D or whatever helpless category you feel confident that you can hammer to smithereens? Wouldn't you rather be the villain if you did? I insist, you wouldn't.  Would you agree that being right and being legal isn't necessarily the same thing? You don't have to make up your mind. Because here you have the one-time opportunity to be both right and technically legal at the same time, while still fighting a villainous system by its own means. Remember for example that time when Batman... No, seriously, if you have come ...

I was wreaking havoc on the official Zwift forum recently in the wake of this little study . A question that kept resurfacing in the discussion was whether it is really reasonable to assume that you can detect cheating (cruising) from just looking at a HR distribution chart. Coming from the outside it may indeed seem like a fair question. I would, however, like to argue that it is not, that you are missing the point. The point is that cruising is the HR distribution graph. You can't really detect it any other way, not even in theory. In fact, you can't really define it any other way. I will try to explain. But first one of those mandatory detours that come with this blog. I thought we would start off with discussing dead celebrities. Let's leave the boring Club 27 out of the picture for a change. But do you know who Borg was? No no, not that Borg. I am referring to Gunnar Borg, PhD MD and former Swedish professor in psychology.  I saw him in person a few times while he was ...

  3R Volcano Climb Race (D) - 29 Aug 2020 I should lay low, waiting for the cat downgrade by next month's end, now that I already have a nice triplet of sub-2.5 races in the ZP race records. But I just couldn't help myself. I had to cheat a little more today and picked this shortish race. It seemed ideal. I chalked it up as honing my cheating skills. The start was hard. A few D's joined up with some C's in a D front group that I decided quickly not to try to go with. I went with the second group instead the initial km's, but we actually caught up with the front group in the underwater tunnel and stuck with them.  I was monitoring my Watts in the Wahoo Fitness app closely of course, and some 12 min into the race the group was still pushing 3.0-3.2 and my average W was by then dangerously high, well above 200W. At 68 kg plus another 7 kg of belly fat, I had only 8 min to get the average down to 185W, my mark to be on the safe side. I dropped and just spun the legs for...

Can you hear the rumbling, people? It may have seemed distant before, but it is creeping closer and closer for every day. Bad omens in the sky. Seals being broken one by one.  And on the crumbling tarmac on top of the ZwiftPower bunker an armada of belligerent racers roll in, complaining over massive cheating in Off the MAAP Tour and elsewhere, riders racing fair attacking cheaters in the race chat. Let's face it, the W/kg categories are falling apart. This is not the end of the beginning. This is the beginning of the end. The Apocalypse, Ragnarok, the Untergang. And from the ashes a Phoenix will rise.

Summer vacation drew to a close and now I'm in the city again with days that grow shorter and over 30 min to get to roads even remotely worth riding. And so I'm back in Zwift on weekdays. Time for some cheating! I noticed that my last little screwup in a race was 1 Jul. Well, it wasn't even a race but an official group ride and ZP picked it up. I got caught on the Watopia PD speed camera doing 2.8 W/kg. But I have served my sentence on 1 Oct. Or should have. We'll see, because my current 90 day top 3 average doesn't actually correspond to activities I have participated in. But anyway, I thought I'd prepare for an autumn of intense, relentless cheating. And for that I need a "legitimate" downgrade. Thus I needed two more races staying within cat D limits. Filler race no 1 First was the Namibian Race League of 23 Aug. I had just recovered from an infection with fever the day before. Not covid this time but bad enough to call in sick. Safe to say, I was i...

We turn again to our investigations of ZwiftPower race data. In the second of the recent Cruiser Sunday posts I discussed briefly whether the spotted difference between cat A and cat C with regards to relative effort levels among top contenders was statistically significant. Now we will try to analyze race data properly, with a third approach. An explanatory sidetrack We will start with a little loop before we get back on track. Imagine you have kids and that you recently moved to a new area. There are two nearby schools to put your kids in and you have the choice between either and want to choose the one where the students have the highest grades. Is there a difference at all, and if there is, can we somehow determine whether that difference is not just random? Or let's make it really simple. You and a friend throw dice. You roll a die 100 times each. The objective is to score the highest total. If the dice are fair, then there should be no difference between your results, right? ...