VIRTUAL PLEASURES

Is the virtual reality world of Zwift bringing the outdoors in?

Indoor training is many things, but not sociable. However, the roll out of Zwift ( www.zwift.com), a virtual reality cycling training game that lets you ride with your mates without leaving home, is changing all that.

Zwift isn’t the first VR game of its kind in cycling but, just like Strava wasn’t the first app you could upload ride data to, it’s packaged up in a slick, accessible way that may just take it to the masses.

You can go for a casual ride, or make it competitive and race for jerseys, and it’s this ‘gamification’ element that is certain to attract the Strava crowd.

You need a subscription (free for 50km, then US$10/month). You also need a good laptop, a turbo trainer, an ANT+ cadence/ speed sensor, an ANT+ dongle, internet connection and a TV (the bigger the better). For the best experience, Zwift advises a turbo that records power.

It’s only recently gone live after months of beta testing where the only route was a loop of Zwift Island, but the number of virtual worlds is growing and will in time include real-world courses such as that of the World Championships in Richmond, Virginia last September. At the moment cyclists can communicate via a phone app and text messages but the founders envisage being able to talk verbally in the future.

For 60-year-old New Yorker Jeffrey Ritter, finding Zwift has been a shot in the arm for morale as he recovers from a serious injury picked up while training for the Race Across America.

Doctors told him to stay off the road for at least a year and he missed cycling, from a fitness and social perspective.

“I can’t call Zwift a life-saver, the doctors and my wife did that, but I’m no longer alone and depressed in my basement, I’m sitting with friends in this virtual world. For cyclists it’s social media on steroids.”

TOP-END SPEED

train it. You can’t replicate terrain indoors, but you can replicate the effort and leg speed needed. And it will translate to the bike, despite what purists will tell you.”

Fletcher-coached athlete Mark Fenn (see The Insider, p103) adds: “Is there a limit to replicating climbs indoors? No, if anything its easier. Where I live there are no long climbs, but setting cadence and power on the Wattbike to simulate climbs is easy.” Try 3 x 15min blocks, with five minutes of recovery in between, riding at a high intensity that replicates your effort level on a climb. Try to achieve this with a high cadence, rather than pushing a big gear. “Top-end speed comes from base endurance, but a lot of people neglect that, so you get people doing a lot of high-end intervals and ‘threshold’-type work, but all they’re doing is the same thing over and over again,” explains Fletcher. “Improvement comes from punching up that huge engine that you need, and then just topping it up as the icing on the cake.

“So the bulk of the work that my endurance riders do is building that base endurance and what I call sustained power – the ability to sustain their power for a long period of time. If you’re aiming for a 100-mile sportive, what you need to be able to do is sustain that power for four or five hours, or however long it takes, and that’s not really about doing highend intervals.”

“If you are in the category of a racer who is going to be up there vying for position then you will have to be able to react to people putting the hammer down, and you will need to do some very specific work for that. It’s no less or more important than endurance or anything else, it’s just another part of the plan.” Top up your top end by introducing all-out efforts into an endurance session: two blocks of five minutes sprinting flat out for 10 seconds then 50 seconds of recovery, with a recovery period in between the two blocks. “The thing about ‘threshold’ and so-called threshold testing is it comes out with statements like ‘based on that result you should be able to do x for an hour’,” says Fletcher. “Not true. The maths involved in these equations is based on perfection, and perfection doesn’t exist. Not even in a highly trained athlete.

“So if you did a type of threshold test that suggested you could do a given power for an hour and you tried it you’d probably die in the attempt. You might do half-anhour, or 35 minutes, but getting up to an hour might not be possible unless you had that exceptional physiological ability and

THRESHOLD