I'm struggling a bit with Zwift, so I'd appreciate comment.
I've signed up and done a few runs with my club, which were fun. We use the feature that keeps a group together; I assume that you all go at a pace determined by the average power of the whole group or something - we refer to it as the "elastic". Last week they towed me round Muir and the Mountain, which was great. Sadly the one-hour ride ended a little before we got onto the final slope up to the chalet or whatever, and they shot off leaving me in the snow to make my own way up
But it was a good ride and I got up and back down in 90 minutes. Annoyingly, I had to abandon it three flattish miles short of the full loop, so I've not "scored" that full ride yet.
Today I tried the Etape event that went up the same mountain. Complete disaster. After the same 90 minutes I'd barely made it off the last bridge, so near the start of the ascent. Now I know I wasn't being towed round, but 3 and a bit miles in nearly two hours
I'm very much a low-end rider, about 1W/kg. I've no great ambitions - I did have a double bypass last year and, while I'm expected to push my heart rate regularly, I don't think I'll be doing proper intervals any time soon. Rather, I'm looking to do some leisure routes. Finishing the mountain properly would be fun, but not at less than 3mph, which is just dull.
I'm on a very basic set-up, a dumb trainer and an old fixed-wheel bike, but that's good enough for me. I had no idea whether Zwift's estimated power was sensible, so I ran some rough numbers through
this calculator, and it looks in the right ball-park. I don't really care more precisely than that.
Obviously I could lie (a lot) and tell Zwift that I'm a lightweight, but at the moment I seem to be stopping dead on hills even more (and by quite a margin more) than admittedly happens in real life.
So I'm a bit frustrated. Is there any evidence of Zwift being too hard on bottom-end riders?