I’ve been absent from Zwift for the better part of 6 months due to real life keeping me off the bike.
I’d never heard of micro bursting until i raced in a series opener last night and a rider in the category above me got accused of it.
So i came to investigate and found this thread.
I don’t feel I’m either gaming the system or micro bursting. But I am concerned
But when I’m trying to both hang onto the back of a group or if I’m making an attack uphill. I switch to easy gear high cadence ramp ups. To be followed by steadier cadence in a harder gear to maintain power.
Should I be worried that my cadence / pedaling style is going to be classified “strange” or whatever the word they use to define it as?
i will go out on a limb and say don’t worry about it. occasionally i spot people doing it on purpose and the intent is usually very obvious compared to someone who isn’t intentionally trying to ride like a tit
WTRL recently wrote some guidelines defining concretely what they specifically consider to be officially taking the piss:
you’re probably fine. obviously there are always gonna be people on a moral crusade, but those are the boundaries as far as ZRL is concerned, and a decent blueprint for other organisers to follow too in my opinion
Interesting – is this supposed to cover sticky watts exploit too? Has to be sustained as well for multiple minutes? You can benefit just doing 2-3 times over the course of a dozen or so seconds catching back onto a group that you got dropped from. In theory you could Sprint/Coast for a minute, then steady for 20 seconds, and start again – but not break the rules.
i know, but from the perspective of a large race organiser running a league there probably has to be no, or very little doubt. it doesn’t end well for anybody involved if someone is disqualified for cheating and they are not actually cheating. it’s a good start anyway because it at least limits how much someone intent on doing this can actually get away with
I doubt it, that’s just trying to pick up some speed so you can hang onto a higher gear. You can’t just stay in a big gear and punch that right away. Well maybe some people can but not me.
Makes sense since they’ve worded what has to occur to cause automatic disqualification.
However, they should consider rewriting. Change the third bullet to read as simply “This pattern repeats”. Then change the Auto DQ copy to read as “if a rider’s style fits the above definition and is sustained for multiple minutes…”
Makes it bit more clear that the pattern itself, even if repeated for a short period of time, isn’t cool.
Raced with a ttt team and the guy who did this, did it for the entire 40+ min race. It’s just not sustainable for a little while but can be help for quite a long time with the right timing…
As with my ramp up my cadence is high for much longer than the time period described. With my wattage steadily increasing not peaking in just a couple of seconds.
So yeah i guess i vary cadence and gearing to get a burst in certain circumstances.
I think the 100rpm thing here is a red herring and will allow people to continue micro-bursting (eg at 80-90 rpm). There has never been any suggestion (that I recall) that cadence is particularly an issue at all, other than when it drops to zero, and it’s not the cadence per se but the power that matters there.
I don’t know if there(WTRL) algorithm for auto DQ only picks up plus 100 cadence and that is what they were referring to, or if they believe sticky watts, micro bursting etc only happens at over 100rpm.
i wouldn’t be surprised if he just wrote that up to feed it to the pond life on facebook. i cropped most of the post out, there’s actually quite a bit in there that leads me to think that wtrl not only know exactly what it is and what to look for, but also that they have a real interest in doing something about it. because i still haven’t heard anyone from ZHQ even admit this exists, let alone condemn it
i would go try and hassle him about it but this particular post was enough to convince me that he is probably tired of filtering through 500 report tickets about it every tuesday. i did not enjoy sifting through facebook comments to get to it though
i know at least one dude got caught in my division. it was hard to ignore him, really… but all the same. i’d like to think the guy from my division was the inspiration for this crackdown. it would sum the division up pretty well
