Rapha Festive 500 [December 2023]

Events
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Rapha Festive 500’s annual event is here!

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Rapha Festive 500 challenges riders to ride 500 km between December 24 and December 31; adjusted to your local time. While this challenge is traditionally done outdoors, Rapha is teaming up with Zwift and Strava, allowing virtual kilometers to count—so any combination of indoor and outdoor riding counts towards the final goal.

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As long as you’re tracking your rides on Strava, any kilometers logged—both indoors and outdoors—count towards the challenge. Need to connect your Zwift account to Strava? Here is the how-to guide.

If you’re riding the Climb Portal - be sure to set your Elevation Scaling to 100% so Strava will count your activity towards Festive 500. More information on Climb Portal Elevation Scaling here.

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Looking for an event to join? Check out our Festive 500 rides here. Finish any Rapha Festive 500 group ride, and the kit is all yours. To learn more about Rapha Festive 500, check out the FAQ.

Ride on.

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Anyone considering to do it in 1 go? Looking for a 2W/kg pacegroup :smiling_face:

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Can this be changed to make people do 500km during the time period please? Otherwise it is pointless.

Or as in real life, 1000km for the time honoured unofficial Rapha Festive 1000.

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Craaaazzzzyy shotgun start with the RP this morning on 9am MST. Dev’s must have fed them some AI steroids.

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Doing rf 500 as good winter base phase mixing outdoors and indoors. Will not on the zwift jersey unlock rides till closer to the end so the jersey in earned properly.

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In the normal RP groups?

It’s fast when there are too many people in a group. Sometimes Constance group is easier with only 4-5 people.

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Rapha 500 rides have a RP, in my group C, Maria took off and all the riders trying to catch her in the first 2km. Was quite exhilarating actually

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I’m not sure of the logic of these rides.

You need to average 62.5km per day over the 8 days to get the 500km necessary. But these Zwift rides are between 27.7 and 42.7km each. If you want to complete the 500km you either need to do two of them each day or keep riding for an additional 20-35km after finishing the event.

I think that maybe, instead of having 4 categories at 4 different paces that 3 categories at different distances might be more useful. The A category could be close to the 62.5km required daily. The lower categories could be medium and short distances for those who don’t want to do the full distance in one go.

In the ride I did yesterday there were about 500 people in the C category. With that many people do you really need a pace partner? Only being able to see the closest 100 people made trying to ride with the pace partner quite difficult. I think maybe only 50-60 people actually finished with the pace partner anyway. It’s a nice idea but in practice, with so many people, the pace partners are rather pointless don’t you think?

5 Likes
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Another accessible ride with free kit unlock?

Rapha should probably require 600km on Zwift to qualify for the 500km challenge :grinning:

3 Likes
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Or just set it to be a single 501km ride. Which is what some people are doing, the entire 500km in one go. :crazy_face:

Absolutely not me! I have 40km left and done the distance mostly hilly outdoor rides.

I’m staying well clear of the flattest robopacer groups until Festive 500 time is over.

Or make the rides on TT bikes, no draft! :wink: That’s actually not too bad on Tempus- you can keep reasonable pace.