Zwiftcruiser

If you think about sports and games and their rule sets, you can always discern some sort of ethics and ideals in them.  Take chess for example. There is nothing random about chess, except maybe picking sides. In theory, you could foresee just about everything in a chess game, as permutations or possibilities, and thus you have a fair chance to avoid disasters and to push your opponent into a disadvantageous position. The side who wins has done the calculating ahead better, and this is also the ethics of the game. The player who is the best at calculating and visualizing position deserves to win. If they didn't deserve to win, then there would be some handicap rule that would kick in once a player becomes too dominant on the board. No, no holds barred. The smartest guy deserves to win, every time. In football (either kind), the team that scores the most goals wins. They deserve to win because they scored the most goals. It makes them better, more ideal. Scoring more goals than the...

Think about W/kg categories for a second. It's the scourge of Zwift racing. We have talked at length about that already. But let's think in broader terms. What could W/kg possibly be good for at all? How did Zwift come up with these categories to begin with? Let's second-guess a little. Zwift gives us an understanding of our own personal physiology that surpasses even that of the most expensive sports watches. It's all these numbers and zones and whatnot. Confusing at first but they tell us how we work on a bike and given some time we start to get it. What we can and cannot do, what we might be able to improve, how to approach certain types of efforts and challenges. At the center of all this sports science is our functional threshold, arguably the most important of all the numbers. We arrive at our functional threshold power through an FTP test or ramp test in Zwift or sometimes by just going hard yet somewhat consistent in a race. What do we need the FTP or the W/kg f...

A note on the rumor circulating, saying that Zwift is planning to bring ZwiftPower in-house: If this is true, then it is (potentially) FANTASTIC NEWS!   I couldn't be happier, given how busy they must be with Virtual Tour de France going on in the meantime.  I will explain why. If you have read my earlier posts, then you will know already that I strongly object to the race category system in Zwift. It's a dead end. And no third-party life support will change that. In fact, it will only make things worse by giving the false impression it is worth saving. It's time to move on and lay the W/kg race categories to rest once and for all. Don't get me wrong. The community plays a very important part in making Zwift what it is today, similar to other online game communities. And ZwiftPower has been an important force that has helped the rest of the community to develop Zwift racing, and to encourage clubs to organize races at all! And it's voluntary work. Nothing to spit at...

I concluded in the previous post, on cruising in the Virtual Tour de France, that Zwift races are necessarily brutal in their very nature. That said, the men's stage 5 up the Ven-Top route, the virtual Mont Ventoux, was indeed brutal. Perhaps a little too brutal...  I am not saying that there necessarily had to be something fishy about the front trio, but those W/kg numbers they produced were very high.  The break-way effort that lasted all the way to the finish line for all three of them (althought they got separated amongst themselves towards the end) didn't last a full hour. Let's keep that in mind.  Rather, the attack came 18 min into the race and they got to the finish line in about 45 min. That's a 27 min breakaway. Roughly. At least it went on for more than 20 min. Let's keep that in mind too.  And the pace of the break-away trio never settled to match that of the chasing peloton since the three of them were duking it out amongst themselves all the way to the...

With the Tour For All previously as the debut and now with five of six stages completed in the Virtual Tour de France, the World Tour pro riders are beginning to settle in into a world the rest of us are already quite familiar with - the world of Zwift racing. So how are they doing? And are they cruising? That's two questions begging answers. Let's start with the first question. A brief answer would be that the pros seem to be doing fairly well, considering the circumstances. What circumstances? Quite a few things.  First, many of them are still quite new or even completely new to the platform. Remember your first race? Right. That sort of confusion. The 'Imma fire off this truck powerup and then I'll hit 'em like a truck with this early breakaway' confusion. You know the rest of that story. Second, we have all met these non-digitalized roadies that have negative opinions on platforms such as Zwift. 'Zwift miles don't count!' That type of guy. They t...

You have probably already heard about weight doping. That by entering a deflated weight in your Zwift profile you will become faster since it will make your W/kg increase. And there is no one around to catch you red-handed if you do this smartly and only participate in everyday races. Only suckers who suddenly drop a nice even chunk, like 10 kg from one day to the next, will look suspicious. ZwiftPower will react to those and so will fellow racers who might be studying their ZwiftPower profiles. Zwift, however, will not react. You can enter any weight you like at any time. And if you race in the lower categories and make sure to decrease your weight in the profile gradually over time, as if you were on a diet, who would dare to call you a cheater? You were just getting fitter and slimmer! Weight doping, I would assume, could prove to be a big problem in the higher categories. In cat A you only stand to gain if you drop weight, one way or the other, as long as you don't get caught s...

Here is the rundown of my first win in my new career as a cruiser. Or cheater, if you will. So I was coming out of the lockdown. Which was actually never a lockdown in Sweden, only I myself locked myself in voluntarily, sort of. First there were weeks of outdoor riding in fairly cold weather, and as you know, if you don't ride organized outdoors you easily lose fitness coming from Zwift. It didn't get any better catching covid-19 at the one time I had to crawl up from under my isolation rock. I was lucky, no doubt about it. No need for ICU. No scarred lungs. But 5 weeks out of the saddle or any exercise whatsoever nevertheless. Add to that quite a few corona kilos, the extent of which only dawned on me a short time earlier, in terror, as we had recently got a new and more reliable set of scales. Safe to say I was a wreck coming back to cycling. So could I really succeed now as a cheater, which I had planned for? Maybe I actually belonged in the lower category that I intended to...

How do you spot us cruisers? As has been discussed in a previous post, you don't. Not during the race. You may have your suspicions, but you can't tell for sure until the race is registered with Zwift or ZwiftPower . So what do you look for on those web sites? The easiest way to catch a cruiser is to look at the HR graph and look for profiles that don't look like your own. You are looking for riders who had a much easier time in the race than you who did put in a lot of effort.  There is a grayscale of course. Cruising isn't black and white. But sometimes it is ridiculously obvious. I will show you one such example.  Below are two riders participating in the same race. We will keep them anonymous for the sake of decency, and it really doesn't matter. This is from just an ordinary race on an average weekday, just a random race on the daily schedule. One I didn't participate in myself, I should perhaps add. You can find plenty of examples like this if you look fo...

Cruisers are devious adversaries. We will not stand out much from the crowd. The reason is we must not let our average W/kg go over limit. We have to be strategic with our energy spending and only put in as much as is barely needed. For this reason you might not even see us flying at the start like the average sandbagger.  Try to lose us and we will still be glued to your wheel. If you somehow manage to drop us in a climb, don't celebrate just yet. We may have had our reasons. For example, we may have noticed that you are light and easily caught on the flat just past the climb. So we save energy, or rather, save decimals on our average W/kg for later use. We will catch you. And we will drop you. Very little that we do will seem illegitimate during the actual race. We will just seem very BIG STRONK to you. And our only threat during the race are other cruisers. They are our main competitors for the podium, not you.  We must also take care not to get carried away by blatant sand...

As opposed to the other types of cheaters, sandbaggers in general and cruisers are quite easily spotted, if you know what to look for. In a mixed category race sandbaggers will be the riders who fly off the front at start and soon enough end up in a group with the next category above them or worse, their real category. It is really easy to spot a sandbagger.  These days there are various counter-measures to sandbagging that can be used by race organizers. This is mechanics Zwift added during the spring of 2020. Sandbaggers who go over short-term W/kg limits will get a green cone of shame over their heads and will start to suffer a power brake that will eat away some of the cheater's unnatural advantage. Some riders get DQ'd at the finish line for going over limits. For a period Zwift also experimented with ghosting the cheaters, i.e. to make cheating riders just disappear from view to others and from the results board, only they don't notice themselves until the finish line...