Zwift Racing League or Similar

Hey everyone,

I am trying to put my winter plan together and thought that joining the ZRL might be a good idea to keep some intensity up. I am sure Singletrack had a team at one time or another? If that is the case, give me a shout…

Cheers

Joe

What category are you @joedilla? I’m riding with Evolve and they’re still looking for riders, drop me a shout and I can send you details. Current ZRL season is midway through but there is the next season following fairly shortly after.

STW used to do Thursday TTT and the STW league, don’t think they ever got into ZRL.

we started doing Team Time Trials during one of the lockdowns – I think a lot of the people doing that ended up joining other (non-STW) ZRL teams after that came along. Pretty sure there was never an “official” STW ZRL team. However, I’d also be interested!! Or in resurrecting  the TTT (which were great fun & a really good workout).

STW league

this was really good fun as well. Excellently organised by @robbo1234biking if I recall! Maybe if we all bother him enough he’ll do it again  lol 🙂

Difficulty with ZRL is that there are minimum numbers required and maximum numbers allowed on a team and individual races which means you don’t always get a ride and leagues are category specific (and competitive) so if you’re not in that cat you will get spat out hard on the individual events. Makes it hard for a “sociable” team like STW had, Thursday TTT was often made up from a range of different categories, that is easier to manage.

Yeah – i loved the STW races!

We should petition that Robbo bring them back!

DrP

If anyone wants to race ZRL or TTTs (before STW restarts anything) then here’s a link to the Evolve discord channel. All welcome but Cat Ds are like gold dust at the moment.

I hope we can restart something this winter.

Unfortunately I have some much else on these days (Dad taxi!) that my attendance is bound to be too random to sign up for ZRL.

It would be good to do some semi-social races and TTTs though

Drafting Dinos Racing Team are always looking for riders

I’ve not done it yet but The Herd operate a large number of ZRL teams of all different levels on an ad-hoc basis every week so you can dip in and out as required.

Would people be interested in getting Thursday TTT  teams back running? I’ve set them up and it’s easy enough so I don’t mind doing it.

I’d be interested – it was fun last time we had a team

Tomorrow might be a push but incase anyone else sees it any preferences on time slots? I think we used to do 7:30ish before.

Otherwise maybe start next week?

I would give it a go too but conscious that I’m much slower than I used to be (had an accident). Building up fitness again – did my first cross race last weekend. Might struggle to keep up.

Would people be interested in getting Thursday TTT  teams back running? I’ve set them up and it’s easy enough so I don’t mind doing it.

yeah defo! currently feel rough with a cold tho so don’t mind waiting until next week!! 7.30 works for me. pretty flexible with time tbh.

I would definitely be up for the TTT. Snap on the illness but once I’m over that, I’m good to go at any time ?

Bumping this in the hope I might find some of you in Zwiftland. Just got a WahooKickr Core on test, I think I might have done enough preliminary pedalling to join in a few things now. Sod’s law I can’t do Thursday evenings because parenting, but wondered if there’s anything else people recommend? Or if there’s a way to pick certain activities to be completed in your own time but that adds up to a league?

BTW, noticed that the Members Discounts has 5% off trainers in the Zwift shop right now.

The new pen allocation system, Racing Score, has been rushed out despite concerns in the early beta days in July and is now awaiting some tweaks that hopefully improve initial seeding at least.

Zwift Insider Tiny Races are very popular, four back to back short brutal races within an hour on Saturdays, quartets start at 0900; 1500; 2100 GMT.

For those with a Racing Score under ~450, Herd Beginner Races at the weekend shorten the Racing Score ranges per pen.

I don’t know the details, but there appears to be Women Mini Races on Sundays.

ZwiftHQ leagues often have many timeslots for their TT, hill climb, crit and Zmonthly race events (currently replaced by Community Racing Festival until end of November).

As above you need a critical mass of people to get full teams every week. Too many people and people don’t get enough races. You also need to be matched. Even across a category there can be differences in a TTT.

I ride with Zsun. We’ve got everything from D upto the very sharp end of A (we beat some pro teams). Also do social rides, training, TTT, ladder league.

I’m involved in A where we have 5 teams racing in Europe at 1830-1900. A pool of about 40 which works. I can dig out joining instructions if you would like.

Some general basics to consider as well:

• Sign up for a ZwiftPower account which is where most of the race results are hosted, rather than just on Zwift.
• Zwift Companion app is useful for finding events and races to do, ZwiftPower provides a more searchable list.
• If you’re doing a formal race, don’t forget to wear a heart rate monitor otherwise you are likely to be disqualified post event.
• Most of the Tour of Watopia rides that are taking place at the moment (and Tour de Zwift in the New Year) are not true races but many people do try and finish as high as possible so they can be quite competitive.
• Most racing is individual, but there are team events notable Thursday for the WTRL team time trial which runs all year, and then on Tuesdays for the WTRL Team Racing League (runs Sept until late Spring). With these you will need either find some friends to create a team together or join one of the larger Zwift clubs such as ZSunR, AHDR, Galaxy etc etc
• These larger groups have active communities on Facebook as well as Discord
• There are loads of things to try and push yourself with, it depends on your preferences. Racing has been covered pretty well above, but you have many social/general ride groups which try and keep people together to tick off the time/distance and get miles in the legs. There’s plenty of training rides or programmes to choose from too, should you want to focus on a certain aspect such as building power, improving time trialling etc.
• The gamification element means different things to different people, but getting more Drops is akin to having more pennies in your bank account and allows you to puchase more virtual kit such as faster frames and wheels. A related but different concept is experience points (XP) which allows you to progress through the various levels an get access to a few locked routes or more virtual equipment. You earn Drops and XP simply by riding round, so being in a group tends to make that a bit faster. Each time you complete a new route you get double XP bonus for the route, and there’s a tracker to see which routes you need to complete across each of the worlds.

Zwift Insider Tiny Races are very popular, four back to back short brutal races within an hour on Saturdays, quartets start at 0900; 1500; 2100 GMT.

I’m a big fan of the Tiny Races and will often do the 9am one if the weather is crap outside or I’m too busy for a proper ride! Four separate races inside of an hour, good fun, probably great for fitness as well, what’s not to like! Not done any this season yet, might be up for it this Saturday although weather looks ok (if cold!). Would be good to see a regular STW contingent on though.

Tiny Race Series Details: Current Routes, Recent Results, and More

Tiny races are good events but absolutely kill me with ZRS score boundaries they take. I’m absolutely bottom of the category and as the intensity is high as well it’s vicious.

Tiny races are good events but absolutely kill me with ZRS score boundaries they take.

Did well at the weekends TRs and just come 2nd in a Crit Club race so it’s promoted me to (new) C category, which I’ll now be right at the bottom of – for most races. But not the Tiny Races 🙂 I wonder why the category boundaries are set higher for those.

I think it was set to try and even put the distribution across all cats.

@mrhoppy Zwift have rolled out Racing Score v2, recalculating seed scores & all race results thus far – mine has dropped enough so I’m back down to D for all races!

Reproccessing the race results since 25th September under such a different seed score was a nuts idea.

Classification seems to have been mainly based on ~10min power rather than 20min power and 30s power. In some ways this makes sense as it’s rare in a race that you have a 20 min all in effort unless it’s a big climb or possibly an ITT.  Dropping the 30s measure completely seems a little odd though, as many races are pack based attritional efforts with a sprint finish, this kind of helps the heavy/strong sprinter type more.