Zwift Racing: Its only a game...

Let me first confess my inexperience. Outside of 80’s arcade games and the Atari home console with Dig Dug and Q-Bert, I don't have much gaming experience. As a kid, the arcade games I enjoyed the most were the ones that involved going fast, winding roads and dusty trails; like my real life adventures of riding dirt bikes. I was as 9 or 10 when I cruised wooded trails on my Honda 70, before being tall enough for my brother's Suzuki 125. Already I digress (nostalgia attacks)...

But maybe that's why I immediately felt at home on Zwift. Its pretty cool to cruise around Watopia’s winding roads, climb a snowy mountain in August and even kick up some dust on a dirt road. Using Zwift to ride inside while getting a good dose of exercised induced endorphins? Utopia. (Huh, rhymes with Watopia).

Enter Zwift Academy and it became social. As a newbie to the platform (spring of 2016), I was able to connect virtually and meaningfully with real women, in a way I had yet to do in my ‘real life’. Plus, I learned the added value of structured indoor training, by way of the workout module. Then, to test my fitness, I began racing on Zwift.

While many may consider “Zwift” to be the gamification of cycling, it didn’t become a “game” to me until I started racing on the platform. Inherent in racing, there is competition. There are winners and losers. And now, with big prizes on the line, stakes. And as stakes get ratcheted up from “bragging rights” and water bottles, to airfare and cash, well, things get a little more intense. So yeah, racing is fun and I’m training- but I’m also competing for big prizes. So rules, and the enforcement of them, matter. This doesn’t erode the fun for me as racer; it enhances the fun, because it makes for fair(er) competition.

Over the past few weeks, there has been a lot of discussion of rules & racing in the of many forums. In some groups it's becoming so saturated, some riders turn their noses or simply tune out. And I get it. But we need to squelch the noise and tune into the signal. It is important to get to the larger conversations about fair racing, proper calibration, rules, etc. because this is the infancy of virtual cycling racing. No, this won’t replace the outdoor stuff, but it's proving it will have a place of its own. And by this, I don't mean just taking its place within "cycling", I mean carving out place of its own, as eSport.

As a grown person, with a full-time job and a family, I don’t have the luxury of traveling to races every week during the outdoor season. Though I ride outside as much as weather allows, I can reasonably expect to race just once month IRL during the outdoor season. Nothing, and I mean nothing, can replace a riding outside, but racing on my trainer keeps me engaged in competition. I like the convenience of competing regardless of weather or life commitments.

So with this background I race on Zwift. I watch with much excitement and anticipation, and wonder what virtual cycling racing will look like in the future. In one year, five years, 15 years? I hope there will be competitions I never imagined. In the meantime, I hope the rules come into focus with transparency and common sense- and will be deployed consistently, in the spirit of fair racing. But to get there, we need to legitimize it by agreeing virtual cycling racing is more than a game.