During some workouts a section can go from ERG to freeride. With virtual shifting, any time a free ride section comes up the default is the starting gear, 8th. Understandably, if you’re not using ERG mode, this is a non-issue. However, for those that do, generally freeride sections follow a ramp up effort and once you’re ramped up in ERG mode you get dropped down to 8th gear during the freeride portion which zaps your power and spins you out, thus wasting time and watts shifting back up sometimes 10+ gears just to get back into the swing of the workout.
If Zwift could either:
A) remember the last gear used during the workout or previous freeride section that would solve at least follow on freeride sections; It wouldn’t solve the first one jump from ERG to freeride though.
B) Allow the user to choose the gear 10-20 seconds prior to the free ride section. During the section of workout preceding the freeride, Zwift could alert the user to select a gear they want to be in as a place holder then once the freeride starts, it will engage that resistance/gear selected.
Combo of A and B – Allowing the user to select the gear prior to freeride sections beginning AND remembering that gear would be awesome.
I don’t understand why they changed the default. Is there a post to the forum or thread from someone saying they were struggling to get the bike moving?
I mean I think there are 4 scenarios here right? :-
(a) you join a robopacer - well the slowest of these, D, on the flat is around gear 10/gear 11 depending what cadence you so, so now whatever robopacer you pick you have to change up a bunch of gears to get in a suitable one.
(b) you start from the side of the road stationary, the ‘just ride’ choice. Well you can put the bike easily in whatever gear you want, right?
(c) You start from a pen for some kind of event or race. Again these let you set the gear during the warmup - but there can’t be many people who want to start a race in gear 8 can there? Even the tour de zwift etc there’s usually a bit of a surge at the start.
(d) Your workout scenario - which, as you suggest, you generally want to be in a higher rather than lower gear and you probably want it to remember the gear but certainly unlikely you’ll want to be in gear 8.
Are there more scenarios? My calc here is that 3 out of 4 pretty much everyone would want a higher gear than 8 and the one where some might say they like a low gear to start - a ride when they’re stationary there’s no time constraint on them selecting that low gear (although, yes, ideally make it configurable)
So I don’t understand why they made it default to 8.
