Zwift Setup & First Impressions

Introduction

Just over a week ago my Zwift Ride with Kickr Core was delivered. I’m not intending to review it or Zwift itself because I’ve nothing to compare it to and my knowledge and expertise in this field is zero. A search on YouTube will provide you with plenty of reviews and thoughts about it. Instead I’m going to describe my experience of setting it all up and using it from the perspective of someone with zero real fitness.

The Pain Cave

Apparently the term for the room where you do things like indoor cycling is a pain cave. Mine is the room which my daughter used as her snug/study whilst she was at school. It then became more of a junk storage room (a box room if I’m being polite) and has essentially been left untouched since she went off to university.

The Zwift Ride itself was easy to set up, even for someone who is not very dextrous but rather than using the paper guides which ship with it I followed their videos which were excellent. Initially I also followed their advice about seat and handlebar positions based on your height but more on that below.

As well as the indoor trainer itself I bought Zwift’s training mat (the room is carpeted and I really didn’t want sweat dripping onto the floor) and their tablet holder so that I could be up and running with Zwift easily on my iPad. If I then switched to using a TV I could use my iPad for watching or listening to other things during long rides.

The other things I bought right at the start were a fan and a Wahoo TICKR FIT Heart Rate Armband.

The fan is important because you do get very hot when riding indoors since there is no breeze to help you cool down. I bought a Vacmaster Cardio54 Fitness Fan and I bought it from the manufacturer because signing up for their newsletter gave me a 10% discount. This fan has a remote control which is incredibly useful as it allows you to turn the fan on and off or change the level of it whilst you are riding. This fan can also be mounted on a VESA stand or on a tripod but I have it sitting on a tabletop which blows the air at torso-height.

After a couple of days I decided that I did want a larger screen than my iPad so I dug out an old computer monitor and connected it to an Apple TV which has the Zwift app on it. To connect all of your bits and pieces (the trainer, heart rate monitor, Zwift controls, etc.) I do need to use the Zwift Companion app on my iPhone and if you are an Android user I don’t think that this is going to work so you might need to use a PC rather than an Apple TV.

As an aside about PC vs Apple TV, perhaps the biggest advantage of a PC is that you can get a full 60FPS 4K experience whereas the Apple TV app is 30FPS and 1080p. But the Apple TV option is quick and easy to set up and use and, unless you have a powerful enough PC handy, quite a bit cheaper.

Clothing & Accessories

I bought some hand towels to wipe myself and the bike down and I also bought some headbands (which I look ridiculous wearing because I don’t have hair that needs holding back) which are excellent for keeping sweat out of your eyes.

Drinking is very important to replenish the fluids you loose through sweating so I have a sports water bottle handy and it allows me to drink whilst I am pedalling. As I progress I may add another bottle and start to use some electrolytes to replenish salts but, for now, that feels a bit excessive.

I’m only part-way there with the clothing I want. At the moment I am wearing some old cycling shorts (padded shorts help enormously because saddles are not particularly comfortable and more on this below) but I will be buying some better quality bib shorts very soon. An indoor bike is not like riding a comfortable upright bike with a big saddle so wearing padded Lycra shorts is pretty much inevitable. At least it is only my cat who needs to witness me in them.

I am also currently wearing t-shirts but heavy, wet cotton is not pleasant so I will be buying some cycling jerseys soon too. Having sweat wicking away rather than clinging to me in an increasingly heavy top will be lovely.

At some point I will probably change to clipless pedals and cycling shoes too but for now I’m using the flat pedals that come with the Zwift Ride and my trainers and they are fine for the sorts of rides I am doing at the moment.

The First Few Rides

I did my very first ride as soon as I had assembled the bike. I intended to do a few gentle minutes just to see what Zwift (the app) was about and to make sure everything worked. I was wearing my jeans and slippers. I ended up riding Volcano Circuit, a fairly flat 6 km loop. 12 minutes later I had sweat pouring off me and, my legs were so wobbly that I went downstairs on my bottom because I didn’t trust them.

But there was something very addictive about it and as soon as I started pedalling and saw other riders around me, I just want to push myself to try a little bit harder. And when I finished and was out of breath, hot, sweaty and, at this point, sore, I was already looking forward to having another go. It was fun and rewarding and I felt that I had achieved something by completing an official route.

The next few paragraphs might be a bit bottom-centric I’m afraid because, as expected, the biggest casualty of all of this was my bum. Bike saddles are not built for the comfort of new cyclists. And fat cyclists tend to have more skin down there which traps sweat, rubs and becomes raw. Add in inexperience about bike setup so you are moving around on the saddle a lot more than you should and it is all a recipe for disaster. Oh, and wearing jeans definitely didn’t help either.

By the next day everything was still very tender but I’d dug out some old cycling shorts and decided to just have a quick go to see if they magically fixed everything. 16 minutes and 7 km later I’d complete another loop of Volcano Circuit (I’m not entirely sure why the distance was longer other than this was a Pacer Group ride so maybe it includes a warm up distance). I was hot and sweaty again but my legs worked marginally better and I could (slowly) walk down stairs at least. My bottom however was not in a good way and when I showered after it I was actually worried that I’d rubbed things raw enough to bleed (I hadn’t… it was all just very, very sore).

Maybe fortunately, because it caused me to do some research, my hands and arms were sore both during and after the ride. On day three I took a break to let my bottom recover a bit and I took to YouTube where I found an excellent video about hand and arm pain and pointed to the problem being with the bike setup. I was reaching too far with my arms and I was moving around on the saddle too much because I was reaching too far with my legs.

On day four my bottom was still tender but nowhere near as bad as it had been so I lowered my saddle and brought the handlebars closer, both by quite a large amount (the saddle by two or three “levels” and the handlebars by about six). I then rode a loop of Volcano Circuit but, because things were much more comfortable, I ended up going straight into a second loop. At the end of the 12 km I was still very hot and tired but everything ached a little bit less than it had previously. I will probably continue to play with the setup of the bike and fine-tune things but it was now an awful lot better.

Since then I have done two more rides on days six and eight, both on new routes. After both my legs hurt, I was very hot and sweaty and the sit bones in my bottom were tender but the sense of achievement and the endorphins counter all of that. Later today, day ten, I will be doing another ride and I’m also going to see if I can ride more regularly than every-other-day which I have been doing to let myself recover from the shock of actually doing some exercise and, maybe more importantly, to let my bum recover.

My Plans

As well as riding more regularly and increasing my distances and the climbs during the rides I want to do the following:

• Try a group ride to get a feel of the community side of things.
• Try a race. I know I’ll do badly but who knows… I may not come last and if I do it may not be by too large of a margin.
• Do an FTP (functional threshold power) test to help me gauge over time my fitness improvements. I think it also helps with the Zwift training workouts.

I am very fortunate that I have found a lovely on-line community of people in Ryan Condon’s Discord who are very friendly, supportive and helpful (see my previous post to find out who Ryan is and why he has been a big part of me going from just worrying about my weight and fitness problems to actually doing something about it).

More posts will follow about my health and fitness journey and if you want to follow me on Zwift then please do so.