Getting to Know Slowtwitch Indoors
You could say that Slowtwitch was an early evangelist of Zwift — we've been talking about the platform and hosting weekly rides almost from the beginning. We really enjoy the social aspect of riding with your fellow communities, as apparently do plenty of you: it used to be on a given ride I'd see around 5,000 other people riding in Watopia. That number is more like 15,000 now.
Yes, circumstances of the world are now dictating part of this change. We're now seeing shelter in place orders for many places in California. For many people, indoor training is going to be the only training for the foreseeable future.
With that in mind, we wanted to re-introduce you to our four ride and two run events that we host weekly. We're also planning on ramping up the competitive activity, introducing at least one bike race and one run race per week, because with all of the race cancellations ongoing, we know that some of you are going to want to do nothing but race.
Slowtwitch Indoors Rides
Slowtwitchers gather 4 times per week on Zwift: Tuesday morning's women's only
Ride of the Valkyries, Tuesday Night's Dynamite, the Thursday AM Rise & Grind, and Thursday evening's Hilly Vanilli. Each of our rides has its own personality, but they all share the common trait of being open and inclusive to all ability levels.
Both of our Tuesday rides are structured training workouts; this means that the group is banded together and will ride the "same" speed no matter the power output. The only ask out of you as a rider is to ensure that you keep the pedals turning over so that you don't fall more than 6 meters behind the group. Otherwise, no matter whether you're putting out 100 watts or 400 watts, you'll both be in the group. Structured training workouts are written most often by myself and Dan, although occasionally we'll slip a fast one by you with a guest workout from a coach or pro athlete.
Our Thursday rides, however, are more like your local shop group ride that gets dubbed the "weekly World Championship." We do try to keep each group together for as long as possible. However, with Zwift removing the fence from group rides, we do have our fair share of flyers. Our ride leaders for these events do their best to keep the group controlled, and look to average the middle of their w/KG range by the end of it. Rise and Grind does usually go after sprints and KOMs after a warm-up period, and the final 10 minutes each week are countless attack after attack. With Hilly Vanilli, we try to keep everyone together for as long as possible, even when the group behind catches the one up the road.
At the end of the day, we want everyone to have a fun experience. You can enhance that by joining the conversation on the Zwift Companion app. Our ride leaders tend to be quite chatty…except when I'm having to use my phone to mobile hotspot to run Zwift. I digress…
Slowtwitch Indoors Runs
We've pared back a little bit on our run schedule. Our Monday runs simply weren't getting the mass of people we were looking for. So, Wednesdays it is. Our two runs are pretty unstructured — it's really about the collective showing up, on time, and running together on May Field. As we continue to build volume, we'll look to add a little bit more structure to these events with group workouts. My initial thought is that we'd do our weekly Zwift run race on Sundays — let us know in the comments if you'd prefer another day of the week.
We'll see you in Watopia.
