Virtual (Indoor) Riding
When the weather outside is frightful, or the nation goes into a lockdown, technology now gives us the option to take some of those club rides indoors.
As a club, we have a growing number of members that enjoy virtual riding on Zwift. Even before the events of 2020 forced us to rethink our ride and racing calendar, we had started to run events on Zwift. Read more about the Zwift Racing activity over here On the social side, we run ad hoc rides on weekend days when the weather is looking particularly poor.
If you are interested in participating in some Zwift rides, please ask to be added to our Zwift WhatsApp group.
Our preferred ride platform is Zwift. (https://www.zwift.com/). Here’s a handy article that explains what you need to get started: https://road.cc/content/feature/213282-how-get-started-zwift
In short – the minimum would be an indoor trainer, a means to measure your power output connected to a device that can run the Zwift app (e.g. smartphone, laptop, AppleTV) and an active subscription to Zwift. It doesn’t need to cost the earth to get started!
A more complete setup would make that a smart trainer (a ‘direct drive’ trainer where you remove your rear wheel and mount your bike on the trainer, which lets the trainer control the resistance), a heart-rate monitor & cadence sensor and a decent fan to keep you cool.
To make the social rides feel social, we use Discord (https://discord.com/) to chat to each other while in the pain cave. Discord can be run on a mobile (Apple iOS or Android) or a laptop (Windows / Linux / Mac). It’s worth spending a bit of time making sure you’ve got your microphone setup so that it can hear your voice without also picking up the noise of your trainer. You might need to look at the ‘push to talk’ option. To join the BathCC Discord server, ask for a current invite link in WhatsApp.
