So - because of other competition and work, I tried the baseline ride for the first time on Monday, 13 Sept.
The ride was going fine, then shortly after the start of the sprint / short effort, I lose all resistance. I write it off, it’s late, so I’ll do it tomorrow. (Today, Tuesday 14 Sept) Now EXACTLY the same thing happens at exactly the same spot. I was able to ride fine afterwards, I do sprint efforts all the time with fastest segment points racing - I don’t have anything to explain what happened here.
I’m using a Kickr Core - I’ve done extensive racing with it for a year, and I think this is the first time I’ve seen this problem, and it happened twice on the baseline ride.
I was recording to do a video of the baseline ride - so I put together the two segments, you can see it here: Baseline Ride Resistance Failure
Just looking at the vid that was the first time you hit 1100w on the trainer. Some trainers will cut out when they can’t hold the resistance, this is a safety feature so that it does not overheat.
Try hitting those watts on another flat part of the route and see what happens.
EDIT: the 1100w look like a spike when you reconnected the trainer.
I stopped my ride both times - someone else in my club said the same thing happened on the medium segment too. They’ve changed some settings on the Baseline Ride, as the power-ups are now disabled…
I guess I can’t figure out what else would cause the resistance to drop at exactly the same point in two rides.
my Kickr Core doesn’t have an issue hitting 1100 watts in a sprint, doesn’t lose resistance ever. Could it be the belt going bad maybe? Have you tried doing sprints on other routes like tempus fugit, London, Makuri, etc. since this has started to happen? Can you replicate it anywhere?
I have only had this problem twice - in EXACTLY the same spot, the start of the sprint on the Zwift Academy baseline ride. After the first time, I replicated it in exactly the same spot re-trying the baseline ride the next day - both times, the resistance went to zero, and I (as one would expect) quickly spun out. It’s in the video I linked.
The second time, my cadence reading also went to zero, but I’m pretty sure that’s because that time I was using the trainer estimated cadence instead of a cadence sensor, so when I spun out there’s no longer any power variation per rotation to give a cadence estimate with.
To be clear, I don’t think this is the trainer failing, Gerrie and David seem to be running with that theory. I think it’s an issue with the ZA baseline ride and its interaction with SOMETHING in my setup. I had someone else in my club anecdotally say that the same thing happened to them - they assumed it was intended behavior, carried on and it happened to them on the Titan’s Grove Reverse segment as well.
My setup:
Windows 10 - Desktop with 1660Ti video card
Was using Kickr Core as Power source, Garmin chest strap for HR and
first time was using 4iiii power meter as cadence source, second time using the trainer as cadence source.
Ant+ connection for everything, ANT radio on then end of a USB cable directly under the bottom bracket.
I’ve used this setup for hundreds of races and this is the first (and second) time I’ve lost resistance like this.
Baseline rides were updated again today, so things might be different now?
I was asking if you can replicate it on any other sprint segments to rule out the baseline ride as the cause. It’s worth a try, go sprint on tempus fugit and see if it happens on the longer sprint too. If it does, might be the trainer failing.
Our setup is almost exactly the same other than your 4iiii power meter, I don’t have one. The baseline ride worked fine for me, but I completed it during the first week of ZA and it has been altered now twice since.
I did a points race last Wednesday, next opportunity to get on the trainer was the Monday night attempt as I worked all weekend. I’ll likely be on the trainer over the weekend at some point. This is really frustrating as I’d been intending to do the baseline ride this week all along trying to fit everything in to other races, etc.
I’m probably just giving up on Zwift Academy again, this time before even making it to a workout.
I have 3 weeks and a bit - I’m going to be traveling for work, no trainer, and couldn’t start before now because of a big race and then availability after recovery. There’s no point to it.
Naw. I was so pissed off yesterday when that happened the second time I didn’t ride. If I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it full bore. Not going to easy ride the baseline / finish line rides - they were really the improvement that made me want to try it this year.
It’s already created frustration, and made my training worse. I don’t think there’s a reason to go back and give ZA a chance to ruin another day’s ride.
