It all happened kind of fast. Greg was telling me about this online challenge to complete 9 rides in January on Zwift, an online cycling platform that connects to your indoor trainer and allows you to ride in a virtual world with other real people who are in their basements or living rooms on their indoor trainers. It’s a pretty neat concept, and when doing races or events you can see your placement change when you pass people, feel the resistance on your wheel when you hit a hill (depending on your indoor trainer set-up) and explore virtual landscapes.
So Greg decided to do the Tour de Zwift this January as a way to kickstart the year with some indoor cycling… and then he casually offered to get me an indoor trainer to hook my road bike into if I wanted to join him. We’d originally only purchased one trainer, which meant switching bikes and never riding together. I’d never even considered getting two.
But it was kind of a stroke of genius because now we can ride together, which makes it much more fun. Now we can get our workouts done more efficiently by completing them simultaneously instead of staggering them on the weekends and taking up the entire morning.
The kids are old enough so we can ride while they’re home and awake and puttering around the house doing their own things (including popping in to check out our progress and watch us bike through a futuristic NYC).
With two indoor bikes we could even decide to do an easy ride while watching our favorite television show together instead of sitting on the couch. (Who knows if that will ever happen, but we could.)
We’re in the honeymoon phase now, but I’ve absolutely loved the two rides we’ve done together so far this January.
Zwift can connect to other online platforms and automatically upload your rides, so I don’t have to manually enter my biking mileage into Garmin or Strava in order to track it for my goal of 500 miles in 2019. A goal that I’m awkwardly ahead on thanks to this “Tour de Zwift” challenge – I’ve already biked 55 miles and it’s only January 5th!
I’m excited to have indoor cycling at my disposal right at home all winter so that come snow, sleet, hail and school cancellations I can still get either a treadmill or a cycling workout in without having to face the icy roads or find a babysitter.
Anyone else on Zwift?