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Showing posts from September, 2020

THE BLOG MOVES TO A NEW ADDRESS

  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/

RACE REPORT: 17 SEP 2020, ZHQ BETA CRIT CITY RACE, DOWNTOWN DOLPHIN, 12 LAPS

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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...

RACE REPORT: 15 SEP 2020, 3R SUNDOWN RACE SERIES, WATOPIA FIGURE 8, 1 LAP

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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 ...

TWO RECENT DISCOVERIES OF UTMOST IMPORTANCE FOR PROCEEDINGS IN ZWIFT RACING

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Discovery 1:   Discovery 2: FUCK YEAH! SHOWTIME!

UPDATED: W/KG FAIL 2: THE LIGHT RIDER'S CURSE

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...

W/KG FAIL 1: THE SPRINT RACE CATAPULT

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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...

WHY YOU SHOULD CHEAT TOO

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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 ...