By Lars Hundley
I’ve been on Zwift since around 2019 and I’ve completed more than 300 online races over the years. I typically race online at least once per week. For me it’s a great way to get in some high intensity indoor riding in that isn’t just smart trainer interval training, which is not my favorite way of keeping fit.
I’m much more motivated to go harder and not quit when I’m riding with other cyclists, even if I’m just watching their avatars represented on the screen when I’m doing it. I’ve grown to love online racing because individual races don’t cost anything extra, you don’t have to travel anywhere to race, and you can’t crash and mess up your bike or get hurt.
I’d never even tried racing on any of the other online platforms, because I already understood Zwift and had gotten the hang of how it works. I also wasn’t keen on buying a subscription to multiple online platforms.
Recently though, someone at TrainingPeaks reached out to us to let us know that now that they’ve acquired the indieVelo online racing platform and renamed it TrainingPeaks Virtual, they are making it completely free, no credit card required, through March. (After March, it will be an additional feature of the TrainingPeaks Premium app, which costs $19.95 or $124 per year if you pay upfront — cheaper than Zwift.) Totally free through March seemed like a good reason to check it out, so I did.
One thing I was worried about is that there wouldn’t be enough people using the platform to fill up races, so it would be a ghost town. But it turns out they have a system that puts riders into separate “pens” based on their FTP and power output, but then combines them all in one race so there are enough participants, but you’re really only racing against the people in your own pen.
My pen only had four people in it, but when the race started there were approximately 20 or 30 racers total. It seemed like it was equalizing the groups in some way, because everyone stayed together pretty well from the start.
I had just finished a Zwift race earlier that morning, so I ended up getting dropped and quit pretty quickly. I’m planning to go back and try more races and get a better sense of how they compare.
In general, TrainingPeaks Virtual focuses on more realistic physics, where you have to take corners at a reasonable speed, there is wind to deal with and you have to draft a lot more carefully, more like a real ride. They aren’t yet focusing on graphics, which they’ll improve over time. Even so, I thought the graphics were totally fine.
TrainingPeaks Virtual also has plenty of group rides that are always going on, so you can use it that way, which is also similar to Zwift in that respect.
TrainingPeaks has always had really good structured workouts, which are more comprehensive and a little bit better than Zwift. With the addition of social riding and online racing through the TrainingPeaks Virtual platform, I think it could work as your only online smart trainer app.
If you have a smart trainer, it’s easy to try and completely free for now. All you have to do is download the app, connect it to your smart trainer and start looking for group rides and races, which are happening all the time. It took me less than 10 minutes to create a TrainingPeaks athlete account, connect it to my smart bike and log in and start using it.