I’m new to here, I broke my arm so here I am, what about you? What attracts you the most?
racing anyone in the world any time I want without having to leave the house (:
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Being able to enjoy riding outside. Stay with me here…
I became a dad in 2018 and was riding at a decent club level. We all know that juggling family, work and running a house means cycling drops down the list a bit.
Most of my riding mates have older children and therefore have a bit more free time to ride. So being able to Zwift has meant me being able to maintain and improve my fitness at the same time as they have improved.
Thus, when i get out on the club rides i’m able to ride with the same guys and enjoy the ride.
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Being able to do a great ride without leaving my home. Constraints are normally time, or weather, but either way I can get a decent ride in these days and build my fitness.
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To avoid riding in the streets…I live in one of the fasting growing areas of the US. Traffic has become very heavy and, when I quit riding, almost half the drivers had a cell phone to held to their ear. A risk I was not willing to take.
I could drive out of town and ride but that takes time…with Zwift (and others) in 45-90 minutes I can ride without stopping, tax my system, and see the world. I am solitary…do not need group rides or racing.
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I have limited time to train so I have to ride very early morning when it is mostly dark (5am to 7am).
I have been riding indoors long before Zwift trying everything to keep focus from watching reruns of the Tour to playing racing games. in 2008 I got my first smart trainer and I tried every possible app out there until Zwift came along.
With Zwift I can plan every ride because the weather and traffic is always the same.
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I have limited time Monday to Friday and with the Covid situation I’ve just had to use Zwift.
Being on Apple TV makes it very simple. However it also limits me from doing my own custom workouts so I keep an old laptop computer with PerfPRO Studio for that.
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You can create your workouts on your laptop and it will sync to apple TV.
Mine’s an odd tale I suppose:
I’m autistic and one of the offshoots of that is that I have OCD. This means I have to do the same things everyday, the things I do often gradually increase and over time become completely unmanageable.
I used to cycle outdoors, I started cycling to work and things gradually spiralled out of control. I would be doing 2 to 3 hours before work and the same after work. I had no life outside of work, cycling and sleep.
I used zwift to get things to be more manageable again. I gradually reduced the time I cycled each day - zwift helps with this because I am already at home so can stop at a certain time, much harder to stop after 2 hours if you are still 15 miles from home! I’d do a certain time then once i was comfortable with that I’d try reducing it by 5 or 10 minutes and get used to that and then reduce it again. It was a long process but one that seemed to work for me in a way other things I had tried had not.
I would do a certain time each day and gradually over time reduced this time to more manageable levels.
I have now got this down to an hour a day and this is a level i am very happy with. I now do not ride outside and solely ride on zwift as it is what I enjoy most (as someone who is autistic I really nerd out on the tech side of it too, testing heart rate monitors against each other, power meters against trainers etc).
so, as I said, I’m probably not the most typical user or have the most typical reason for using it but to me zwift helped me to reclaim my life. So in some respect I owe Zwift an awful lot!
TLDR? I zwift so I can live a “normal” life again.
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Ah, I can use TrainingPeaks - even easier! Thanks for the article.
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My basic journey into and on zwift went like this -
Got Rollers (100mm)
Got a power meter (stages g2), ANT+ dongle and started using Golden Cheetah to log & record live while watching videos. I’d got the ANT+ dongle after seeing the 1st GCN Zwift video, thinking I should sign up to this app, it looks cool.
Replaced the 100mm rollers with new 80mm ones.
December 2018, My lovely wife got me a 3 month Zwift Gift card.
January '19 Update says I’ve got a spud laptop, Feb update confirms I’ve got a spud.
April '19, get a basic gamer PC, I’d missed Zwift so much.
June '19, Kickr Core replaces the worn out rollers (bearings hated sprinting, had replaced all 3, gave up)
December 2020, Level 50 
About to pass 30,000km, some days it’s easier to fit in the riding then others thanks to having to Adult.
Being able to ride late at night or ride and be available to the family is a big win, as are my general fitness levels.
Still my best time up the Alpe is still the one I did on a spud laptop while riding 80mm Saris rollers…
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I’m just a regalur guy and reading this is very inspiring. So good to hear (read) that a platform like Zwift is a solution for a lot of people.
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I’m a casual cyclist who loves riding outdoors in the summer months, but not so much in the winter.
For years, I’d said “maybe I should get a turbo trainer” to keep me fit in the winter but I never got one because I found the idea boring.
Then I saw Zwift advertised as something which combined cycling with gaming. They said “Fun is Fast” and I thought “I’m not bothered about being ‘fast’, but I like ‘fun’!”
I learned more about it, got a cheap second-hand smart trainer, got on Zwift and loved it. And after a few months on Zwift, I went back on the road and discovered Zwift had made me a faster rider than ever before, without me even realising!
On Zwift I feel I can really push to my limit because I never need to keep anything in reserve to get me home.
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Always been a keen cyclist but over the last 15 months of COVID-19 restrictions I have developed stress anxiety which as I found out severely restricts my outdoor cycling. So with that got myself a smart setup, zwift and to be honest I have never looked back. Great community, great rides and a workout.
Help me out a lot…
Ride on.
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Racing… honestly, I tried Zwift a couple times over a couple winters and didn’t love it. It was fine, and was doing mostly workouts, but was only subscribing for a couple months in mid-winter when the snowbanks narrowed the roads too much. Early 2020 I found community race series and have subscribed since.
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I was a couch potatoe and bored during first covid wave. So I started with cycling. And I was annoyed to loose all my fitness during cold winter month, and so started zwifting. Now, I am happy to have this opportunity to cycle when weather is not good or when I have limited time.
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Remember, it even rains in Zwift!
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Yesterday, I used first time the wahoo fan, and when climbing up the fox hill in London, it stopped blowing, due to my low speed and when driving down the hill, it started again to blow like hell (linking to driven speed). That was the first time, I thought about putting on a jacked while zwifting.