I just started doing the Zwift Racing training plan, and am pretty confused by something:
The first workout is “Watopia Flat Forward” and during the workout the text overlay would say things specific to the course, like “high power out of this tunnel”… but I wasn’t going out of the tunnel? I’m not sure if I was doing the course the wrong direction, or it started me in the wrong place, or what… but the workout was clearly supposed to be specific to different spots in the course, and it really threw me off. It’s clearly supposed to be set up so that the workout is aligned to the route, but I can’t figure out how to make that happen.
Has anyone else run into this doing that training plan? Is there a better way to ensure I do the right route for that workout? And why the heck does it not just put me on the right course by default, when clearly the workouts are made for particular courses? I checked some of the other workouts and they’re the same. The next one is “Watopia Volcano Circuit” but I don’t know which route to do that one on, and every time I click to start it, Zwift shows me a different set of routes.
It looks like others have posted about this same thing (Zwift Forum doesn’t allow links to my knowledge, but the name of the post is “Race simulation training \ Course sync” by user @Lee_H). That poster thinks the issue is the warmup time, which could certainly be what’s throwing it off: I’m a relative novice to Zwift workouts/Zwift in general, so I don’t know the course well enough to tell if it’s in reverse, starts in the wrong spot, or is just off by the duration of the warmup interval.
Tried some of that plan’s workout a while ago, including Grand Central, syncing efforts to the course was non-existant. I was doing my hardest efforts while descending after the Kom.
Yes, sounds fantastic in principle. However, I tried a few of these “Race Plan” race simulation workouts recently and, even if you select the specified course before the workout starts, you are never spawned to the correct start point after the warm-up ends. So, the HUD commentary and your interval effort never corresponds to the correct part of the course. You’re still getting a decent workout, it’s just not a race simulation for the actual course you’re riding.
This sounds like a problem that will be helped by the upcoming route-based workouts feature. It won’t fix the existing ERG mode workouts, but it should at least keep the workout in sync with the terrain.
