I haven’t been using Zwift for very long, so I’m sure there is a lot of stuff I haven’t tried yet. However, I was wondering what is the view of other people and also the view of the development team at Zwift, with regards to a feature that would facilitate importing outside rides into the Zwift platform to be use indoors.
Regards to everyone and thank you in advance for your replies.
Lenis
I am 100% against it. Zwift XP and other stats should be earned while using Zwift.
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Thank you Paul for your view. I am not familiar with with Zwift XP.
Of course, I would say that different people would use Zwift for different reasons or purposes.
In my case I use it to train and keep a certain level of fitness, but I appreciate that other individuals would use it for other purposes.
Thank you once again for your view.
I think he does want to use Zwift, he just wants to be able to import outdoor routes to Zwift and then ride them in-game, as opposed to being limited by the different worlds Zwift offers.
Personally, I think the Zwift offerings are plenty and don’t see any need to import outdoor rides. I suppose my thoughts on this are twofold: First, if this were to happen I think it would end up like Rouvy or other apps that allow this, where you find yourself to be riding alone nearly all the time. I like that whenever I ride on Zwift there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other riders there at the same time. It not only creates a more social atmosphere, but a more competitive one, too. Second, I think the curation of all of the different routes people might upload would be tedious. And what sort of ‘scenery’ would you get? Surely the Zwift folks wouldn’t be doing all of the programming necessary to make uploaded routes as immersive as the Zwift worlds.
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You would then upload your indoor (Zwift rides) and outdoor to a 3rd party site like Strava, Garmin or many others.
I import a few special rides I train for via the Workout tools. I have one particularly nasty mtb climb that challenges me so I have pulled the fit file from Strava and loaded it as a workout.
When training, it feels exactly like the real thing (without the odd rock on the track) but the scenery is whatever route I chose in Zwift. Probably a few sites out there that do this but my go to is Workout converters | What's on Zwift?
As a feature request - competitors do this successfully and I dont see any reason why Zwift couldnt as well. Personally, I’d rather Zwift focused on fixing broken stuff first but if I could put a couple of my outdoor training rides into this environment and “see” those routes, well then it ticks off another use case for me.
BTW, this is a very popular request so maybe use search and support any of the previous requests also.
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This is actually an interesting question that I hadn’t thought of before - so thanks @Lenis_Losardo for asking. I am training indoors to be able to ride with my husband outdoors and would love to upload some of his routes to see how I do with them. Being able to upload some of his files as workouts would be really great. Also, he rode some beloved routes near his parents’ home in the Black Forest and might like to ride them virtually while stuck here in the flatlands of Houston. I’ll have to ask him and see whether we can figure this out. Thanks @Dean for the link and the description of what you do!
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Nigel, j think you have explained it better than I did on your first paragraph.
Thank you.
Paul, once again, thank you for your input.
I already use Strava, but more for keeping track of my stats and performance. In other words, to see if I am improving as an individual.
I have a Garmin Edge 1000, cycling computer, but I use Strava to see his I compare to other rides on certain sectors, etc.
However, if I could import certain outdoor rides, I could “practice” them on Zwift while the weather is very bad and I am unable to cycle on the roads.
I hope this makes clearer to you.
Dean, thank you very much.
I am tried to import them as a workout, that’s exactly what I would like to do, but I haven’t been able to do it.
But that’s the idea, to get a real ride/track and after you have ridden it Outdoors’s and recorded it on your Garmin device or on Strava, then you import it to Zwift. Even if the scenery didn’t match, it hopefully wouldn’t matter much.
Beth, yes I think it would be great.
People would be able to train for outdoor races, for time trials, etc.
I wanted to see other people’s view.
Clearly, different people have different views, but it is good to see the different perspectives.
Nobody had the right answer or the correct view. Horses for courses!
By the way Nigel, I am not a computer genius, but what I believe it takes is a file converter that would turn a GPX file into ZWO or ZMO (Zwift) file?
There are some website that do it, but then you have to pay their membership too.
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Milan,
Thank you for your post. Unfortunately, the link you have provided for “What’s on Zwift”, subsequently recommends the “Best Bike Split” website, for which I have registered, thinking it would be free. However, unless you pay a subscription of around $19/month, you are not able to use it.
Hey @Lenis_Losardo - if you post up a link to a Strava activity that you want converted, I’ll try and convert it for you. It will take me about 24hrs as I’m just about to go out for the day.
No need for bestbikesplit - just drop your gpx file, set rider and bike, create. No problem on a PC, tested now.
Hi Dean
Thank you very much for your offer to convert the file.
Following Milan’s advice, I managed to create the workout, I will test it shortly to see if it works.
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I think it would be great if we could upload outside activities. I have a plan to ride 150 km a week and I do outside as well. Now on Swift will show that I didn’t manage to reach my plan but I did already considering the outside rides. Why not import data from Strava (e.g) as we easily can export to it?. A ride is a ride, it doesn’t matter if it was virtual or real.
Regarding the XP points: if this is an issue, simply don’t count it. It could be adjusted to overall km tide splitter in virtual and real, like on Strava .
Cheers
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Haven’t you answered your own question? Use Strava to consolidate your activities to track towards your 150km target. FWIW I use Garmin Connect for this.
You can already do this on Strava. Assuming you’ve got all your outdoor and indoor rides syncing to Strava then the totals will be on your profile for you to see. You get separate totals for outdoor and virtual rides, plus an All Ride total which is what you’ll be wanting to keep track of to reach your 150k weekly target.
As mentioned above you can do the same with Garmin, but Connect shows the last 7 days rather than the weekly total.
I don’t see the need for Zwift to allow us to add outdoor miles to indoor totals given that other platforms they already integrate with offer this and with Zwift being a purely indoor riding platform.
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