First Ride: MyWhoosh – Bahrain

Last night, Google’s feed thing on my phone (not sure what it’s called, swipe left from the Home screen on Android) recommended an article to me from road.cc about an alternative to Zwift called MyWhoosh.

There wasn’t a huge amount of info to be had around MyWhoosh, other than that it’s a virtual cycling ‘game’ in the same vein as Zwift, that it’s developed in Abu Dhabi (so is very flush with cash), and that it runs on Windows, Android, and iOS – but not Apple TV or Apple Mac.

Right off the bat, I will tell you two things:

1. Connectivity was not seamless
2. If you have tried RGT Cycling, it’s closer to that than Zwift.

Those are really the big things here.

But that said, I have barely tested this. And that is, in part, down to that first issue.

Connectivity Issues

Zwift has been massively improving lately. I find myself moaning about it less and less, and enjoying it more and more.

One thing that was never an issue with Zwift was connectivity. Whether on iPad, Mac, or Windows, it really is pain free to set up. Bluetooth, Ant+, app connectivity on your phone, it all just works. And I never really appreciated that. Not until I tried other competing products, anyway.

I must have spent 20 minutes today trying, and failing to get MyWhoosh to connect to my Windows PC.

I tried rebooting, restarting the app, unplugging Bluetooth and only using Ant+, disconnecting the Garmin head unit entirely, trying different cables… the works.

Weirdly, MyWhoosh did detect my devices. But they didn’t connect when I clicked ‘connect’. They just hung, and then I couldn’t disconnect them to try again. Hence the reboots.

It’s a pain in the ass when you’re sat on the bike, things don’t work, so you unclip, get off, totter over to the PC, try different settings, get back on the bike, clip in, it doesn’t work, unclip, get off, repeat ad-nauseam.

In the end what did work was to take the Bluetooth USB dongle, disconnect everything else, and use my USB extension cable to put the dongle right next to the bike, and then it all connected, except the Power option… which didn’t seem to matter.

In short then: just use Bluetooth.

This is a bit weird, as the way everything was setup worked fine for Zwift for the last 3+ years, but hey ho, and on we go.

It’s Like RGT Cycling

In many ways, MyWhoosh reminded me of RGT Cycling.

This is far from a review, because right now I have only 10km / 20 minutes of experience with the app to really give a true opinion. But here’s what I think so far.

Lots Of Bots

The maps are fairly busy, but the game itself seems more focused on events.

Races have real cash prizes apparently.

However, races seem to run at times that suit people on the other side of the world. I saw two listed, one setting off at 2am, and another at 4am GMT. They do seem to concentrate on Sundays for race days, but still, that’s a tall ask for a man like me, who wouldn’t even stand a chance of making money anyway.

The events I spectated, and when I finally got in to ride myself, the roads I rode were fairly busy with bots. There was at least one other real person on there, I think, but mostly it was computer players riding around. That always surprised me that Zwift took so long to get the Pace Partner thing figured out, because RGT / MyWhoosh have this out of the box. And apparently Zwift had that early doors, too.

Anyway, the bots had some issues. When they passed me, they always seemed to be looking over their shoulder. Kinda weird, definitely a bug. Also they went at odd paces, so drafting them or whatever was going to be a challenge as a sole rider.

But I guess the alternative is the maps are ghost towns…

It Looks Like RGT

Graphically it’s somewhere between RGT and Zwift. I was expecting better graphics, and there are three settings plus an ‘auto’ mode to pick out the best detail level for your computer:

The routes are more detailed than RGT, as best I remember.

But some of the elements are weird – there are tons of planes flying over, way too many to be realistic.

Also there was either no, or very low sound – I couldn’t tell, but I couldn’t seem to hear anything even with the system volume on max. Again, could be a bug, but I find any options to mess with the sound. Not the end of the world, I usually mute Zwift anyway.

When I finally did get riding I found the UI mostly nicer than Zwift.

The right hand bad is basically standard – riders ahead and behind, their watts per kilo, distance, and flag.

There’s a pop out menu to chat:

That chat menu seemed to take up too much screen real estate, and if lots of people were chatting it would be easier to move that out to a companion app (not available), or something else. I mean, I’m running this at 4K so to lose a good 1/8th of the screen to a chunky chat menu seems weird. But at least it was legible.

The map at the top was good, better than Zwift’s but didn’t show the full route.

The little green marker was my current position on a sort of ‘mid range’ distance view. Above you can see a hill is ahead, and the number “1.3” in grey was the current gradient. The addition of the decimal was quite nice. Reminded me of the Tacx Software.

I liked the big power meter thing on the top left. That was well done. Unfortunately it guessed at my FTP, so the metrics were a bit skewy, but it was nice all the same.

As I haven’t yet tried a workout, I can’t say what happens on the UI during one of them:

Overall I’d say it just pips Zwift on practical UI.

There’s A Lot To See And Do

I think I counted 4 worlds:

• Colombia
• Australia
• Alula (?)
• Arabia

Each world had several routes – from 2 upwards.

There are some big climbs in there, too. Colombia had one ~1,000m effort, and two smaller ones around the 4-600m range.

There’s a bunch of fairly hilly routes, and then a smaller number of flat tracks.

I’m looking forwards to trying out the different worlds.

Interesting Stats

Post ride I got a bunch of interesting stats to view.

One of the most interesting was this output:

As my FTP figure was incorrect, the red / yellow spikes are not accurate. That would be the power range.

The top line, jagging up and down then dropping strangely before resuming – that’s the heart rate graph.

And below that is cadence.

There was the typical Zwift style output:

And then after this I was prompted to set my FTP:

I feel like this should have happened in the setup phase pre-ride. But I think that small attention to detail and initial user on-boarding is something that needs work. It’s not bad, but with a bit of TLC it could be really good.

And I think winning over the Zwift crowd requires that level of detail.

Maybe I could have done my FTP pre-ride, because after finishing up I found this screen:

And I was able to change it in there.

First Impressions Count

There is a bunch more stuff I’ve not touched on here.

But there reason for that is that I haven’t yet fully explored the software. It was all a bit rushed because I wasted so much time getting the game working that by that point I’d already done most of my bike time for the day, on what was already planned to be a light riding day.

I’m glad I got the software working, and I’m glad it doesn’t seem to suffer from the functionality-ruining thing that Wahoo’s software suffers from where it reads my wattages incorrectly:

Did I Mention It’s Free?

Oh, right yeah.

It’s free.

Because the UAE devs have access to basically cheat mode levels of capital (it’s owned by the son of the ruler of Dubai or something), then they can make the whole thing free to play.

Apparently it will be monetised using in-game ads, but I saw none.

Because it’s free it means I don’t need to rush back inside a 14 day trial period. Great stuff.

And that means I will be doing the Stage 3 TdZ ride, and Stage 3 Flat Is Fast race before I get back on the MyWhoosh.

But I’m going to use MyWhoosh for my next workout and see how I get on.

Overall I’d say give it a go. It’s free, it’s only 10gb to download, and if you stick to Bluetooth you should be in for a fairly pain free setup process.

If you try it, let me know how you find it.