Zwift Racing, the Good and the Bad.

Hello good people, I am back. Why, I hear you ask. Well, as a half arsed blogger, I thought some my enjoy this little tale of internet joy. Firstly, let us start off with a screen grab, with the approval of the author.

Now, I am not a fan of FaceBook, so very rarely do I use it. Today i signed in to a messaging app and I saw a request from Cam Hill. So I opened it, and the above screenshot was what ensued.

Firstly, it seems a desperate move to request a chat on FaceBook just to dump shit on someone you don’t know. Claiming I was a clown, that I sandbagged and I was a half arse blogger in the very first exchange. It seems I have another fan. Then apparently I was ignorant and then pleading a lack of ignorance. I was also transparent and a number of people consider my blog rubbish.

This was a lot to digest. I don’t know this bloke from a bar of soap. Heady stuff.

Now, if you are a member of the KISS Zwift Road race group on Facebook, the whole thread is here. If you aren’t I am going to grab some bits to show exactly what happened and what I said.

So that was the group selection criteria. So, let’s take a look at my Strava segment history for that segment.

Now, unless I am missing something, I was 30 seconds inside the cut off time for group 2. A couple of things to note.

Firstly, I think this was my 2nd KISS race ever. So, Cam Hill was possibly correct saying I was ignorant of Zwiftpower, as I had hardly even looked at it before. But the FTP system had absolutely nothing to do with the group selection for that race.

The second thing to take into account was I had never done that segment in a group. Now, I am no sports scientist, so I have no idea what sort of advantage that would be. However, I have done a few AHDR rides and I do know it makes a big difference. The only thing that I did think about was the Group 1 guys probably wouldn’t be a bunch of heavy hitters like in the AHDR group. So I stayed in group one.

Just after the ride, things seemed reasonably civil.

I even took this on board, even though I didn’t quiet understand the theory behind it considering the race was grouped by segment times, not grades.

Then, it started to go a bit dark.

Cam Hill brings up FTP and weight again here. Also C grade and D or E grade. No where in the rules did it mention this. And saying A graders influence the outcome! I can only assume he means the guy that smashed everyone and got disqualified.

All this brings me the ultimate question. What were we racing for? It is a virtual race with so many variations in so many areas, it seems to me to be a little immature to be making the claims made above over a 1 off race. To actually request a FaceBook chat to make certain accusations seems even more bizarre to me. We are chasing pixels on a screen. I got toweled up by my 64 year old mate the other day. Did i go berserk and make claims that he didn’t understand the system? Nope, I got beat, that is it. Some days you win, most days you don’t.

I am confident that Cam and maybe others will have their say in the comments, and I have no issue with that. But I would also love to hear from the guys at KISS to see what they think. This sort of thing would drive me nuts if I was running it in my spare time and for no reward.

I have now done 3 or 4 KISS races and they have all been great fun and well run. It is an excellent way for novice racers to test themselves against others. People should be thankful that the guys running all the Zwift races put their time into setting these up for us to race.

Zwift is a fantastic platform, and it has only gotten better with the organised races. Hopefully guys like Cam Hill don’t scare others off with their super critical attitudes towards people new to the game. After all, that is all it is, a computer game.

Ride On!