Indoor Cycling – Weekly Review July 1st – July 7th 2019

Each week Zwift sends me an email summarising my activity for the week. For previous weekly reviews click here.

This week consisted of two rides:

• 3R Richmond UCI Hilly Race (Category D)
• A light exercise / structured workout

Two rides. Count them. Sucks.

I had such a great week of riding planned as well.

I wanted to race on Tuesday in a really well attended race – I can’t quite remember the name now, but it had over 400 participants / registrations. It seemed to be something Australian, as most of the riders were from that region. Also it was at 10am on a Tuesday morning, so well outside the usual times I get to ride.

Also, I wanted to get in a century ride later in the week. And do an FTP test likely on the Thursday.

What went wrong?

During the 3R Richmond UCI Hilly Race, I hurt my leg (again) and I had a bunch of weird noises coming from the bike.

It would have been a bad idea to ride in the scheduled race with a sore calf muscle, so I skipped it. I’d make up for it later in the week, or so I thought.

I’ve had various issues lately with phantom shifting around the middle of the back ring, and also been struggling a little to get back up from the little ring to the big ring at the front.

Taking Philip’s comment into consideration, on Thursday afternoon I decided to try the following:

• Swap my cassette over on the Tacx Neo 2 to use the Shimano Ultegra I’ve got, but currently don’t use;
• Fix up my gear issues both front and back.

Welp. It all went very wrong.

Being a total newbie, I really have no idea what I’m doing when mucking around with the technical aspects of bike maintenance.

What I know I did wrong is pull the gear cable (with a pair of pliers) so hard that I pulled the cable right out of the front right hand shifter.

7 hours later (no joke), I had to give up. I couldn’t fix it, no matter how many YouTube videos I watched, or how sweaty and angry I found myself.

It got so late on Thursday that by the time I’d finished mucking around, there were only two bike shops open. One was Evans, the other Halfords.

I rang both. Neither answered. Not a great sign. So I left it till the next morning.

On Friday I rang Evans – they answered. I explained my plight in details. I explained I’d bought the bike from them. I spoke for quite some time. And finally, the guy goes – unfortunately we have no workshop time anymore, as we are shutting down.

Top stuff.

I didn’t both with Halfords. They have such bad Google reviews that I bypassed them entirely.

I rang a variety of local bike repair shops. Most didn’t answer. Business must be booming. Of the only two who did answer, I picked one (the one who didn’t sound like he was stressed to high hell), and dropped off my bike later on in the day when he was back from a job.

Unfortunately, that’s currently where my bike remains. I’ve not heard anything since, so am still bike-less.

Altogether, a pretty sorry week.

But importantly: completely my own fault.

On the plus side, the 3R Richmond UCI Hilly Race was my strongest ever performance on the bike. Once again Richmond left me with body pain, but I can’t complain about the effort I put in.

Zwift Coders Update

Now onto something a little lot more nerdy.

My day job is (or was, until very recently) as a software developer. The job part of it is just a happy by-product really. I am very fortunate to get paid to do what I love.

As above, I love the fact that cycling spits out vast quantities of data. Data that I can then turn into nice graphs and charts.

I’ve been very keen to fix a major flaw (as I see it) in the Zwift experience: lack of long term leaderboards.

“Chris”, I hear you say, “Strava already does this!”

Yes, it does. And yes, they (along with a small few other companies) get special access to Zwift to pull data after each ride.

As “hobby” developers, the rest of us do not get this special access. Therefore getting my data directly out of Zwift is a royal pain in the ass.

However, with all my downtime this week, I have managed to figure out how to pull my data out of Zwift, unpack it all, and then transmogrificate (not a real word or thing) the data into laps that I can use to make Leader Boards.

Whoop whoop. It’s the sound of the police.

Yes, on this front, this last week has been very successful. I also completed another project last week as well, so all round – aside from bike stuff – it wasn’t half bad.

What still remains (and what I am doing this week, or for a small part of it anyway) is getting that transmogrificated data into a database I control. That way I can do the leader boards and that snazzy Weighted FTP graph with much less hassle than it currently entails.

I would love to be able to open this up and share it with anyone who wants to get their own stats in this manner. However, as mentioned above, Zwift just make this really painful. Such a shame. I really like Zwift, but some of their decisions just baffle me. For example, they aren’t even considering Ghost Riders in the foreseeable future. So silly imho.

Anyway, hopefully over the course of this week, my leader boards will be online on this site.

And an even bigger hopefully, I might even get my bike back so I can set some new times, too.