You made an extraordinary claim. I asked for the extraordinary evidence to support your claim. My question was not rhetorical, rather it is entirely straightforward and reasonable.

You can quote that for all time.

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http://www.cyclecoach.com
http://www.aerocoach.com.au

This is the core question. The key to enjoying both Strava and Swift competition is the ability to compartmentalize butthurt and savage type-A competitive instinct to only real-life racing. If you're prone to butthurt, virtual competition may not be for you. Have fun with Strava and Zwift.

I’d love to see some of these “weight fudgers” or fishy power reading folks try out a real life A+ group hammer ride.

The more I ride the more I realize two things that are both true but seemingly at odds with each other:

-always someone faster than you, and sometimes vastly faster
-nowhere near as many roadies as think they can hang in a real life A or A+ ride can actually do so

Yep.

I could care less if some electronic image rolls away from me as long as I’m getting my work in. Zwift is a fun way to distract and one can generally tell if the image next to you is connected to a person of comparable ability to you or not. Or, alternatively, has adjusted their virtual wkg the way you have. In any case, it’s virtual. Pin on a number in the heat, wet, or cold, draft, pull, and risk crashing out, flatting and or being dropped while your gf stands roadside, bored stiff, texting her other bf if you want to race bikes, versus game. Then, you can give a shit, be humbled, humiliated, etc.

I'm not her other bf. We just f*ck a lot.

This I agree with. Now, a qualifier to my comment: I can handle getting dropped in real life but not virtual so won’t be signing up for Zwift.

But, lots of people pay good money for their fun there. The business model isn’t sustainable if customers get pissed that the competition is fake?

Why did so much big sponsor money leave real world cycling? Cheating.

Sure, it’s a video game. Sure, it’s not a blood bag cheater in the world tour. But it involves people’s money, so there has to be some assurance otherwise that money won’t stay. In this case customer money.

Well, after a good series of races, the situation is clear.
90% of A's are mythic addicts, just look at their profiles to see that they have little chance of pushing 300w+. We even see some of them daring the 340 while they must struggle to reach the 200...
For profiles without a photo, it is disqualificatory: for me it would be worth staying in D, or perhaps C if a certain number of proven km (constancy in training).
The worst is the ZADA approval of pure touring cyclists, pretending to be pro level. The worst ones (guignols that we find at the top of the rankings):
- Chinese (team +1S full troll, and they openly assume it...)
- The Danish
- Anonymous people (without photo).


There's an interesting thing behind all this, but I'll keep my mouth shut. That these weak and stupid ones stay as they are, believe it, you should do the races and not worry about them, focusing on your own thing. Even idiots at 12w/kg when they look like nothing apart from a troll are useful.

Yes, Danish bloke has a FTP 2400 W. Behind him is an english chap with FTP 2080 W. Not bad. I wonder what their sprint power can be.

But in C and B groups the overall situation is not so bad actually.

Yep, I've much more respect for the B and C riders, who have much more chance to be honest. You know what they worth, but as for all those 340w+ charlots that look like beginners/sick...

It is possible to hold to opposing thoughts: (1) Zwift "racing" is mostly a joke, with too many of the "A" and "B" riders riding with fake weight and intentionally overestimating power set-ups. (2) Zwift is a great off-season training tool that has really got people on the trainer consistently like little else I have seen.

- the rise of the group events and group rides is my favorite Zwift thing- love seeing 300 riders in the same jersey stream by the other way when doing my thing.
- also love to see the rarer country flags, fun to think you are riding with someone on the other side of the world.

For the few B I've checked, they look much more legit. It's not very very hard to reach a B level, if you train "just correctly" (not too bad). Then getting A is from my point of view a bit harder (excepted if very light), but the 300w+ generally (whatever the weight), you really don't see this every day, even when you live in Belgium a cycling country. So from countries that are lost, without any bike culture, seeing people as old / sick / ill / notorious beginners / overweight, overtake them happily...

Yes, racing is mostly a joke, but because of troll/mythomans, not because that's what it's essentially. Like IRL cycling races, which are the same kind of circus.

There’s also a lot of rubbish riders on zwift.
Like the guys above have noted, B grade is a good place to be.

See my thread about my first 4/5 race in real life.....

I'll politely disagree with the 300w thing. Especially when I spent that many minutes of a race at or above 300w.

I'm of the idea now that bike racing period is an anomaly versus "finishing a 1/2 marathon" or "finishing a 1/2 IM". Sure, to compete and win at those, you're really special. And for many, just finishing is special. But the basic ability level just to not get last and a DNF is beyond hanging on for the local quick group ride. It's like saying "oh, sorry, no 1/2 marathon finisher medal for you....you only ran an 8min/mi pace....you needed a 7min/mi to get a medal".

Sure, there's Zwift cheats. But Zwift gets an interesting subset of cycling culture. You're paying to play a racing video game. Not even half of real world bike racers necessarily do that. So you're already getting a pretty solid bunch of people together.

The most absurd are the flat out impossible rides

The following is the top 18 riders for the easy approach to the big climb in Watopia. It's 4 miles at 5%.


The fastest by a lady doing 1.1 kW for 10 minutes. None of places 2-10 are anywhere near believable either.

To find an actual believable result, we have to go all the way to 46th place. It's one of slowtwitch's own; dude is a legit climber and rides on Jelly Belly. As i've never heard of the guys faster than he, i'd assume there's a lot of garbage

What do you mean ? I speak about an FTP (1 hour) above 300w, not pushing it for some minutes. That means someone able to ride at 43km/h for one hour, with a TT bike. You don't meet that everyday, excepted among elites. And I don't see many "solid" riders there. My problem is not to be beaten (I always do good places just pushing like a retard : i don't care it's a workout), but to be "beaten" by noobs, who push 12w/kg for more than 1 minute until they come back, when they just train randomly, and come from countries where the few Caucasians athletes, who live there, make the law against hundreds of natives. As soon there's a video game, we see these trolls. But IRL...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MtfinntuCo

Follow Scottie Weiss if you want to know what a legit top cyclist can do.

But yeah I've given up looking through the leaderboards because of exactly what your picture shows, you have 50kg females at the top of leaderboards doing 500-600w for an hour.

Don't you know? Here on Slowtwitch everybody has an FTP >300w.

I kind of don't care about the virtual dopers. The thing that bothers me most is the weird group drafting dynamics, something not right there. I was trying to catch back up to my group after a lapse in concentration meant I got spit out the back on a short climb, and even though I could see I was producing 1w/kg more than the guy at the front, I still wasn't gaining. Understand if it was the guys in the pack, but this was the guy with his nose in the wind. Seems almost preposterously hard to gain on a group sometimes.

They don't attack on flat races, and just wait for the sprint...
I raced vs a pro (Jon Mould), and attacked 5-6 times, and nobody never followed, they just waited for the sprint too.

You have to go extremly fast if you're dropped alone, like 6-8w/kg as long as you can. Adam Weeb lost the contact (6-7") yesterday on our big group ride (3-3.5w/kg), and he never came back, even after pushing 6-7w/kg. Sometimes you really have to push 8w/kg to catch, or if you blow up before, rest some seconds and boost again as fast as you can until you came back. You must not lose your time pushing only 2w/kg more than them, you'll chase for ages.

Not to mention that the 3-3.5 w/kg group rides are harder than zwift races. Further exacerbated by people blasting off at 4.5-5w/kg. It’s like dude, just go race if you are that strong; the rest of us just want a tranquillo tempo ride...

I've gotten away a few times on flat(ish) races. Definitely harder (like in real life), but it is possible.

I like the group rides where it's "open" but you're encouraged to stay at, say 3.0-3.5 (or whatever). Or I like them when the bulk of people respect the ride and ride leader.

I've had a harder time enjoying the group workouts where Zwift packs everyone together regardless of what you do. It decouples enough from simulated group riding that something is lost, at least for me.

I guess this is a Zwift thing? Even in a race, there's no need to blast off at 150% of your FTP for the first 4-5 minutes. I'm not a "racer" but I've been told it's not like that in real life for a typical road race.

X2! I tried a couple group workouts and it's the only Zwift format I don't like, and for the same reason you stated. Mentally it just wrecks it when you know you are pushing x watts but virtual reality is greatly altered by the group "melding" (and imo, it's always negatively altered).

I think I'd get more satisfaction from a group workout if the individual effort was accurately reflected and then (just like in real life), if you end up near other similar strength riders, so be it. If not, then u just suffer knowing others are doing the same thing. (maybe this isn't easy to achieve, but that's what I'd prefer).

It can be like that in some road races, particularly criteriums. But the reason it typically happens is in situations where it's difficult to move up because maybe the road is narrow. That's why in, say, a cyclocross race the start is batshit crazy - because passing can take great effort.

But in Zwift there is no such situation. You can always move up just by pedalling harder. I think in Zwift it's purely a group psychology. There's some strong guys who started going apeshit at the start just to avoid dragging a field of wheelsuckers along for the entire race. So then other guys started going apeshit to try to neutralize those guys. Then pretty soon going apeshit just being a requirement for just saying in the main field.

It's weird. I wouldn't mind it in races - it's hard to bitch about there because the attack at the start - even if rare in real life - is a legitimate racing tactic. But I agree it's annoying in regular group rides. It'd be cool if Zwift maybe tried to neutralize the starts on group rides a bit to make them more sane. Maybe increase the aerodynamic drag or something for the first 5 minutes so there's a heavy cost for going off the front.