Jim's Basement Blog #3: Virtual Drafting
- By Kate Hector
- Apr 15, 2020
So yeah, I’m competitive
It will come as surprise to exactly nobody who knows me that today, when someone started to draft (virtually) me (virtually) on a climb (virtual climb) in Zwift (a virtual world of little import) I abandoned my workout entirely, rode as hard as could and turned my face into this;
Take that virtual dude!
Sometimes I think my life consists of 2 equal parts:
- Eating, breathing, sleeping, touching my face
- Anger management
Any free time I have outside of those 2 equal parts is mainly dedicated to making comments related to this meme;
What happened?
A friend of mine read the previous 2 blogs (first and second) and noted to me;
"The vast majority of people on Zwift don’t ride ERG. Most people do wacky group rides and just ride around. Me included."
First of all, what are you guys doing, ERG mode is for winners.
Second of all, this is the same person who once called me and started the conversation with this;
"JIMMY! YOU POOPIN?!"
And I was. So I tend to respect his opinion. I also stopped answering the phone on the toilet.
SO, knowing this, I figured I would try just riding around in Zwift. Of course, I still loaded a workout on my test Dash M50 GPS cycling computers because it’s amazing and I can’t imagine why riding around (virtually) would be motivating at all. There I am, noodling around, doing some intervals (actually was kind of not doing them) and such and some guy starts drafting me on the climb right about…
And that’s that. I went all out on a climb (virtual) and then when I got to the top I exploded across the finish line (virtual) a mess (not virtual, very not).
What does this mean? I’m a terrible person?
Maybe so. Maaaaybe so.
In my journey back to fitness it means that I just did what basically amounts to a fitness test. Let’s check how it measures up to my previous data. Let me just pull out the Stages Link app, open this ride, and…
Sandbagger
Again, sure. That seems true. At least I finally updated my weight in Zwift to be the real one and not the weight I used to have when I rode all day. But ultimately, yeah, this reflects moderately poorly on me for complaining about fitness. It seems even worse that I then rode back up the climb just to take a picture of my time since I wasn’t sure I could get a screenshot after the ride;
