Zwift leans into data - Is the era of casual cycling over?
“You can now use the Zwift Companion app to better understand your cycling fitness. Gain more insight into your training readiness, set achievable goals, and push yourself!”
Is the era of the enthusiast cyclist over? Zwift has always maintained its basis as a game first, and the training comes almost accidentally as a result of playing the“game” Will the slow trickle of training services and features mean the platform might end up as dreary as apps like TrainingPeaks?
In an interview with Athletech News, Zwift’s PR director said, “When we launched Zwift in 2014, our mission was to make more people more active, more often. We believed that by gamifying our cycling experience, we would help make indoor training more fun.” Zwift still stand by their game status, but this seems at odds with the recent update that shifts towards a focus on consistent training and fitness gains. Users now have workouts ranked with fitness scores that are averaged out over 90 days to give a rolling fitness average, helping users to see if their fitness is growing or decreasing.
ZWIFT rolled out these new training tracking features late last month at ZWIFT Live in Alcudia Mallorca, which I was lucky enough to attend and help to trial the ability to link third-party apps and sync over outdoor rides with Wahoo and Garmin devices before the software went live. The ability to sync outdoor rides to the previously indoor-exclusive platform was a convenient tie-in to their first in-person ZWIFT event.
ZWIFT CEO Erick Min presenting some of the new features to media at the event.
The event was a slick lesson in how cycling media events could be run across the board. Zwift is predominantly a software company and not a traditional bike industry business, and this was clearly evident in their attention to detail, organisation and media-first focus with the event. Influencers and media were always in the sight lines of a photographer, never more than an arm's reach from a “content” opportunity for your followers, and the location itself was a luxury 5-star hotel in the resort town of Alcudia.
In many ways the luxury surroundings somewhat overshadowed the fairly granular software updates to the ZWIFT platform, but they are nonetheless impactful and tell an interesting story about the direction the cycling software world may be heading in. These changes are certainly a move to position ZWIFT as an evergreen training option for its users and limit the “churn” of subscriptions over the summer months, conversely, it is a move away from the gamification of ZWIFT that they have previously preached.
Media ride: me enjoying a chat with Russ Downing
The creation of dependency on keeping one's fitness number trending upwards and being rewarded for said training seems to remove the ability for ZWIFT to be a game purely and will encourage more repeat visits as users become hooked on seeing improvements in their fitness. I certainly understand the need for retention on ZWIFT’s side; if they can be the singular source for their users' fitness data, they will stay with the platform year-round to keep up with the highs and lows of their training and overall progress. Similarly, many users stay loyal to training peaks and similar platforms for the crucial “CTL” number, which stands for Chronic training load and is a 90-day rolling average of your rides TSS that is more heavily weighted to recent rides. Zwift’s new training tools add a similar fitness number that I have been told by Zwift employees will essentially mirror the number you would also see in TrainingPeaks.
The mirroring of TrainingPeaks stats comes at an interesting time, late last year, TrainingPeaks purchased Indievelo, a virtual ride platform competing with ZWIFT. This software has now been fully integrated into the TrainingPeaks subscription and is simply titled “TrainingPeaks virtual”. While usage stats are not available for the platform, I can confidently expect ZWIFT to far outweigh Indievelo active users. However, the growing strength of TrainingPeaks could cause ZWIFT to feel the need to improve their training-focused option to compete with more data-focused platforms.
Trainingpeaks virtual new virtual ride platform
This leads me to ask to what extent this shift in focus is led by the companies themselves improving their software, as we have discussed, or possibly led by consumers themselves? During the COVID bike boom, it seemed like cycling was opening up to the world, and the sport was becoming a space where hobbyists and racers alike could coexist in the same space. As COVID riders have fallen away from the sport, is it only the pre-existing racers and those willing to adapt to a more data-driven approach that remain in the game? The increased focus from software companies on training, AI coaching, training load and recovery metrics certainly implies this is where they think the consumer appetites lie.
The next few years will be decisive for ZWIFT, will they remain the stand-out favourite in the space, or will competitors start to muscle into their field? Current standings have ZWIFT decisively out in front. Furthermore, as AI potentially takes a further hold on the data world, will users move towards self-coaching, or will we see more platforms appear, harnessing the power of ever-improving AI tools?
Let’s watch this space.
