If my outdoor kit had been washed and dried, I more than likely would have head outdoors today. It’s not a nice day, but it’s dry enough to get outdoors. Alas, it wasn’t to be. I can only assume all my good bib shorts are under the insurmountable pile of washing, somewhere.
Fortunately I do have my older, tatty, and rather well worn old bib shorts as my backups. They do for indoor, at a push. Suitably bibbed up, I was thinking I might do an hour’s FTP Builder ride, but just as I was about to give it a click, I remembered I always seem to get swallowed up and kicked out the back of the Zwift Pace Partner bunches when I do these rides… so why not join one of them instead?
One thing that puts me off the Pace Partner bots is that joining them is a kind of “into the deep water” feeling, if you go in sans warm up. Well, I decided I could warm up on the ride and joined all the same. Of course, Zwift then crashed on me, so it took me about 5 minutes to get the game loaded back up, recognising all my kit, and then back on to the ride. It worked the second time, and I didn’t stop pedalling throughout, so I was as good as warmed up by the time I joined.
I may be wrong on this, but the last time I think I did a pace partners ride was back on my Advent of Cycling ride on my birthday last year. Things have definitely improved since then.
The general user experience of the pace partners now feels quite slick, by Zwift standards. There’s no awful on screen markers – thank God – and it’s always easy to see the pace bot. They’ve also seemingly fixed the distance issues that plagued pace partners early on, whereby I was constantly falling off both the front and back of the distance ranges to the bot.
All in all, once I was on with Coco Cadence today, I managed to stick with her fairly comfortably for the full hour.
When I worked my way through the bonus – from 1x, to 1.2x, then 1.4x, etc, up to 2.5x, and then it reset – I was a bit miffed. I’d worked for ~30 minutes to hit 2.5x and to watch it reset was annoying. But then after a moment or two I actually preferred it. It reset the little mini game, time to play again. Good times.
For what it’s worth, the whole multiplier thing seems to work well for keeping a good sized group together. Maybe they could incorporate that same mechanic into other rides?
So yeah, good times today. A decent endurance workout, and more fun than riding solo.
