- [Taren] Mornin' Trainiacs.
On today's endurance adventure,
you might see a grown Terran cry.
As we've been doing on Thursdays,
for the last, aah, six, nine months,
today is our open-to-all, group Zwift ride.
And,
some yahoo really wrote a jerk of a workout.
It's me.
What we have cooked up here today,
is a series of Russian sprints.
Russian sprints are like cycling's answer to Ipecac serum.
Make me throw up.
I should get a bucket.
Now, what we're gonna do, is we're gonna do five minutes
of easy spinning, and then four times 15 seconds
at FTP with high cadence,
to basically turn on the connection
between the brain and the legs,
with a 60-second easy spin between.
Then the Russian sprints are,
here, get this, here's how it works.
We go. Ready?
Five seconds fast, 55 seconds easy, 10 seconds fast,
50 seconds easy, 15 seconds fast, 45 seconds easy,
20 seconds fast, 40 seconds easy.
And it just goes up like that,
where you go faster for five seconds longer every time,
and then you reduce the rest by five seconds
every time until we get to 50 seconds fast,
10 seconds easy, 55 seconds fast.
And then there is a three minute, 10 second easy spin.
And then we do it again.
And all of this intense,
the fast is meant to be as fast as you can go.
Like here's a good way to understand
how to do your fast.
Your zone four and your zone five.
Which is, I mean it's essentially the same.
'Cause what you're looking to do
in both cases is go as fast as you can go
without fading by the end of an interval,
or by fading by the final interval,
and feeling like you could have done one more.
That's a real sweet spot.
So zone four efforts should be a little bit longer.
Zone five efforts should be a little bit shorter,
because we're always looking at getting
into that like near failure, but not quite failure state,
and that's what ends up making the speed improvements.
I'm really, really procrastinating here.
So we actually recently had the CEO of Zwift
on the podcast.
And I ended up asking him,
like, what is it that makes Zwift a success?
And I figured that they must have some sort of a,
I don't know, like gamification that we're tapping into.
The primal sensors of the brain,
the amygdala, and something really fancy like that.
And what he said is,
"No," it's essentially just the ability to,
if you have to ride inside like I do,
you can still connect with people online.
And then I recently ended up chatting with Craig,
shout out to Craig, who's my contact at Zwift.
And I said like, what is it that keeps people
on the platform, on Zwift?
And he said, "Well, if people can find a community
to ride with, that's what makes it more enjoyable for them.
And that's what test to show that people stick around."
So let's say there's a future here,
where I end up surviving this workout.
After that happens, I'll explain how you can,
A, find our group ride, if you wanna join us.
But B, find group rides, find group races.
Actually talk to people.
How do you converse,
and how do you arrange to ride with friends?
(background upbeat music)
How do you make it so much more engaging
than just solo suffering?
I have shared suffering here coming up today.
(intriguing music)
(bike spinning)
Whoa! Whoa!
That's gonna leave a mark.
(laughing).
Holy jeez.
Shout out to Trainiacs,
Robin and Chrissy who had the bright idea to
up the bias at the end by 3%.
(breathing heavily)
For the last three intervals.
Harry got up to 175.
I needed a group to get us going through that.
That was good.
Now I need, composure.
Give me maybe just a few days to recover.
I think I'm whole again.
Alright.
Let's go through a tallied up
five different ways that you can end up
riding with people in Zwift.
We'll go through them fairly quickly
and give you some ideas about how to optimize it.
So you don't get kicked out of the platform
halfway through a ride.
And so that it's user-friendly for you.
Our first way to ride with somebody
is through a group ride like we've done.
Now, only approved partners
like us can hold organized group events
where there's a set workout
that everyone is joined together in.
To find these, you open the Zwift Companion app
and the Zwift Companion app needs to be
on the same WiFi network
as whatever your running Zwift on.
Whether it's a Apple TV like I have,
or an iPad or whatever that might be.
Once you get to the Zwift Companion app,
you go to,
events.
Tap on the bike or the run,
whether it's a bike or run event.
And then,
you go forward,
to whatever day the event is going to be.
So in our case, we hold our group rides.
Right now it is 9:00 a.m, Central Time on Thursdays.
And it's open to all.
You can come to that.
So what you do if our workout was uploaded right now,
which it will be by the time you see this,
you scroll down, find the event that you want, click on it.
And, let's say in this case, this is just a group ride.
You would tap the add button.
And it's going to give you an opportunity to save it,
to set a reminder, to add it to the calendar.
And what's gonna happen is that
you start riding around that time.
There's going to be a little box,
in the left-hand corner of the screen,
that's gonna ask you if you wanna join the event.
And you click on that
and then you'll wait to join the event.
And you can start talking to people.
And if you don't want to get kicked out,
try to lower the resolution,
especially if you're using an Apple TV 4K, like I am.
I was getting kicked out of my own rides at the start.
And then I lowered the resolution to 720p.
Everything is good.
Then to end up talking to people,
when you end up going into that ride,
you're gonna be able to message people,
like I was today, through the app.
Again, the Zwift Companion app.
And it's basically just gonna automatically,
end up going and detecting that you're in this ride.
And you can talk to them and you can text away like I do,
or you can dictate into the app if you would rather do that,
or you can actually set up a discord channel.
Now, we don't quite have a discord channel set up,
but that's something that I'm gonna be looking at,
because group runs, while chatting with people,
I think would be a lot of fun.
The next way that you can ride with people
is basically an identical way.
But you're looking for a race.
So you go through the events,
and you look for something that is indicated as a race.
So often it's something like a challenge.
It's indicated as a race, you can search for a race.
And in this case, there are A, B, C, and D groups.
And each group, as you scroll down,
ends up having an indication of the Watts per kg.
Some tips on this, be very conservative.
These races are really intense.
The highest heart rates that I've ever recorded,
were in the Zwift race.
Don't expect that you're gonna be able
to chat really, at all through this.
You're just lucky if you can hang on.
So in my case, theoretically, I could do 3.2-4 Watts
or even 4-5 Watts per kg.
But for one reason or another, they are so competitive,
that it ends up being way more than what you expect.
So if it's your first time doing a race,
startup pretty conservative,
so you don't get just destroyed,
and not having a good experience.
I mean, even if you go down a level
you're probably going to have a rough experience.
They're tough, really tough.
But you just add these the exact same way
that you would add a group ride.
You hit plus.
Again, you're going to have the opportunity
to set a reminder, add it to your calendar.
And then you just tune in a few minutes beforehand,
and click that button to join the event.
And then hang on for dear life.
Next thing, that I wanna show you,
is how to actually use a pace partner.
Let's say you don't know anyone, or there's no race.
You're just tuning in,
and you don't wanna ride completely alone.
Well, you can join one of the pace partners
that's going around the entire time.
So Zwift has pace partners that are going around
continuously through the world that you can always join.
And what you want to do
is switch to the world that you want.
And there's always gonna be paced partners in Watopia.
Go down to the pace partners that are here.
You can select the pace partners.
And why this is really nice, is because,
yeah, it is avatar,
and it's not a real human that you are getting paced by,
but, there's a huge group, because a lot of people
end up joining the pace partners.
So that's a way to make some new friends
and start building a community.
Now, we've got here, an introduction to pace partners.
You hit next.
And then you end up choosing your pace partner
based on Watts per kg, if you are a cyclist.
And the Watts per kg are kind of small on screen,
but we'll put them up here for you.
On the bike, this D group pace partner
is 1-2.4 Watts per kg.
The C group is 2.5-3.1 Watts per kg.
The B group is 3.2-3.9 Watts per kg.
And the A group is 4+ Watts per kg.
And just like with the group ride,
you can chat with everyone who's around you.
Zwift also just released run group pace partners.
I had to write this down.
The fastest group is 407 per K, 636 per mile.
That's often it.
503 per K, 806 per mile is the B group.
640 per K, 1043 per mile is the C group.
820K, 1324 per mile is the D group.
And fun fact, that 1324 per mile,
that is the slowest possible effort
that you can put out while Zwift running,
where the avatar actually runs.
Fun fact.
While we're here, another way that you can ride
with people is basically a celebrity sighting.
So the same place that we found the pace partners,
you're gonna actually find people
that you already follow, that are currently doing a ride.
So right now there's Pro triathlete,
Kelsey Withrow, ITU athlete, Matt McElroy,
and Yvonne Timewell, from the Zwift Tri Academy
here in Watopia.
And if you get to a place,
a world that there isn't actually anyone
that you follow like this,
just go to a different world.
Quite often Watopia being the host world,
is where there's the most amount of people.
So you just scroll down,
you select who you wanna ride with,
join them, and it will ask if you want to ride with them.
And then it's basically gonna take you exactly
to where they are.
And you'll have a few seconds to start riding,
and see it'll, pedal assist and it's up to me
and Whoa, Whoa, Whoa.
Bye Yvonne.
Ride on, girl.
The final way that you can ride with people,
let's say you don't wanna ride with Yvonne
or some other celebrity in a group ride.
And just meeting up with them.
Most people are really cool with you
just meeting up with them.
It gives them a chance to chat, doing a race.
You don't want to do anything like that.
You wanna actually find a friend
and literally ride with them.
You can set that up again.
It's in the Zwift Companion app.
And what you do is you go to events.
And then up here where we've got the icons
for the bike, the run.
The third icon next to the runner,
is what you'd click on.
You'd hit create a meetup.
You'd select whether you want to be a bike or a run meetup.
You'd select the time that you wanna do it.
You'd select the world that you wanna do it.
You'd select where you start, the distance or the duration.
And then here's the key.
You've gotta invite Zwifters,
but only Zwifters following you,
are athletes that you can invite.
So you go through your following list,
and you would hit all the Zwifters that you wanna follow.
So essentially, you've just gotta know the people
and you can't go and spam like Lucy, Charles, Barkley.
Actually the first time that I ever met Lucy,
it was from riding with her on here.
And she turned me inside out.
So that's it Trainiacs.
Those are the main ways that you can find a community
to ride with on Zwift,
and make the suffering go by, much quicker.
And push you a little bit extra.
Now again, if you wanna join us, we have a group ride
that's open to all, that happens on Thursdays.
Typically it's 9:00 a.m Central Time.
Sometimes it's fairly easy,
sometimes, like today, it's fairly hard.
They're not all that intense.
But check me out on Zwift.
The first name is T, the last name is Rayaflonterran.
That's how you'd find me on Zwift.
And, ride on!
Later Trainiacs.