These are strange days for the sport of bike racing, especially in New York City where racing is on hold through at least June 30th. Given the sheer impossibility of social distancing during a race - the peloton is just one mass of tightly packed riders sweating, breathing heavily, and at times snot rocketing on each other - it is unfortunately hard to know when bike racing will return to NYC or what it will look like when it does.

Combine this lack of racing with elevated real world stress plus the difficulty in consistently getting outdoors to ride and you have a perfect recipe to lose motivation for training. That recipe definitely hit me hard - after several great weekends in a row of mild weather and fun team rides, for much of late February and March I was averaging perhaps five hours per week of training, all of it indoors.

During this early stretch of COVID related quarantines I took in some very fun Zwoom racing with the team, but even so my training duration through the middle of April looked admittedly lackluster. As captured in chart form:

But roll this same chart forward another two weeks and it suddenly looks very different. The big change? Two massive back to back 17-hour weeks that were sufficient to throw the entire vertical axis out of whack. As it turns out, the last time I put in this sort of duration in a single week was early 2017 (below, right), and suddenly I am doing it in back to back weeks and all indoors? What gives?

The Motivation: Peer Support and Electronic Badges

What changed is that two fellow TBD racers convinced a bunch of the team to take on #EveryZwiftRouteTBD (TBD in this instance = To Be Done). What does that lengthy hashtag mean exactly? Well it requires completing a long list of Zwift routes that we estimate add up to approximately 70 to 80 hours of riding, more than 2,000 kilometres, and nearly 33,000 meters of climbing. In short: it is a whole lot of indoor training.

But it’s not just a made up TBD challenge either - Zwift awards you a little electronic badge for every route you complete (there are non-route badges as well but we will save those for another day). These badges make #EveryZwiftRouteTBD a little bit like collecting all the participation trophies of our youth.

It is undoubtedly one of the silliest bike related things that I have done, on par with the time that I convinced Lisa to follow me into the California backcountry on a road bike only to start quickly wondering about wilderness survival techniques. But it also turns out that if you put a challenge in front of me in spreadsheet form AND add peer support/pressure to the mix, then I may very well respond by putting in some very long hours on the bike.

In fact, according to our official #EveryZwiftRouteTBD spreadsheet, in the first two weeks I checked off every single one of the 15 longest routes in the challenge:

A screenshot of part of the #EveryZwiftRouteTBD spreadsheet. To check out the live version of the spreadsheet click here.

With 70+ Hours of Riding Equipment Matters

Admittedly, part of the fun has been figuring out how to maximize efficiency while conquering routes on Zwift. In short, I figure that with more than seventy hours of riding, equipment matters. So for the first time I headed over to the Zwift drop shop to grab three different rides - mixing things up from my normal reliance on the Tron Bike:

Most of these routes were solo efforts without much opportunity to draft, so for anything flat or rolling I use the Felt IA - effectively the fastest TT bike on Zwift - combined with Zipp 808/Super9 wheels that are the fastest in the game short of reaching Level 45+.
Of course, this Felt IA with disc wheels is not a lightweight setup so I also grabbed the best climbing setup currently available to me: the Specialized Tarmac Pro with Enve 3.4 wheels. Anytime a climb of 20+ minutes is involved, I’ll break out this setup. One day I’ll hopefully manage to grab the Lightweight wheelset that gets raffled at the top of the Alpe, but until then this is my climbing rig.
Lastly, because a number of the routes traverse the Jungle Loop on Watopia - everyone in the know please collectively heavy sigh with me - I grabbed a Specialized Epic S-Works MTB. For whatever magical reason, a MTB clocks significantly faster times than road/TT bikes on the dirt roads in the Jungle and I’ll take whatever time savings I can get.

The Longest Ride: London PRL Full

So how has it been putting in nearly 20-hours weeks back to back for the first time in many years? Honestly, it hasn’t been so bad. Doing this sort of work indoors makes pacing and managing nutrition a cake walk compared to outdoor riding. Normally boredom is the biggest challenge but in the midst of all of the real world stresses, it has been a relief to tune out to a movie or TV series and put in a few hours on the bike. And to be honest, it has been a nice change not having to worry about distracted or angry drivers as is the case with riding outside.

Of course, some of the #EveryZwiftRouteTBD courses require more than just a few hours. The London PRL Full has been my longest day on the bike (this comes after several Zwift centuries in pre-quarantine times). Six hours is a long day on the trainer, but the multi-lap nature of the route allowed me to get into a steady routine that made the time practically fly by: I’d work reasonably hard up the climb and then take a break on the descent. I also mixed in a few rest stops to refill bottles and stretch as required. By the end my legs were definitely tired and my power output definitely declined in the final thirty minutes, but overall it was much less of a challenge than I expected.

And big days on the bike like this have come with a reward: after a long struggle with injury in the fall, all of my fitness metrics finally started moving in the ‘right’ direction in recent weeks. The before and after in TrainingPeaks where the change may look a bit minor but the ramp in training stress is significant:

Trying to complete #EVERYZwiftRouteTBD in just four weeks?

Now that all the long course badges have been earned, it’s not all smooth sailing from here as I still have several shorter routes to complete. These short courses require toggling back and forth during a ride to select and complete a series of 7-30 min options. Can I get all of the remaining routes polished off within an additional two weeks of training? That’s may be a stretch, but we’ll see.

And once those are complete, where does that leave me? It’s clear that this challenge triggered something in my brain - whether it was checking the boxes on a neatly designed spreadsheet, figuring out the best tactics for this video game cycling tool, or simply just a reason to spend 4+ hours in my pain cave - does the motivation last to get me through the time before we can ride outside in groups and race again? Once again only time — or another peer pressured idea — will tell.

Tips for Completing Every Zwift Route

To see what badges you currently have or track them as you tick them off, you will need to be on a Zwift route and hit the Menu button, then Badges.
Make sure before you exit a course that you have definitely earned the badge - nothing is more frustrating than going through the trouble of climbing the Alpe du Zwift at the end of a long ride and not getting the electronic credit. You will see a banner pop up across your screen whenever you do finish but until you get the hang of seeing that or think you miss it, always best to check before exiting the course.
Utilize Zwift Meetups both for getting to courses outside of the available worlds on offer and given day as well as to have some buddies to share in the experience - and watts - with you. Pro tip: convince your fast friends on Zwift who are not yet familiar with the averaging effect of no drop meetups to tow you around on the hard climbs. The rubber band effect is pretty fun when you drift to the back of your group. Just note you can only organize 3 meetups a day and if you start one with teammates, you all need to be on time and pedaling to begin. We did test out the mid ride stop and were able to make a group snack/nature break work so long as we all agreed to slow down and stop and restart as a group.
Hydration is key - I drink 1 bottle every 30 min indoors and make sure to have good air flow and nutrition throughout. Use downhills as an opportunity for your avatar to aero tuck and go refill your bottles.
Don’t ignore the Drop Shop to upgrade your equipment and don’t be afraid to switch bikes mid ride to optimize your steed. If you’re going to spend 70+ hours on your indoor ride, might as well make it efficient.