ZWIFT - I Gave in and Tried It

I have had a turbo trainer for a long time - initially a simple "dumb" unit (a Tacx that I sold on EBay lst year) and a few years ago my wife bought me a Tacx T2240 Flow trainer which I actually used a lot more

Tacx 2240 Flow

I used Road Grand Tours (RGT), and also Velo Reality (here) a simple trainer app that allowed you to create workouts (power as a function of time):

 

After a Lockdown Summer in 2020 and good weather that ran all the way through to late September I'd not needed to even think about riding the turbo, but as the nights drew in and the weather got worse there was really no option. After a few final attempts I gave up on RGT as I could never connect using the Android app and if you can't connect you can't ride. Even when I was on RGT earlier in the year it was fairly empty to be honest, so I deleted the app from my phone and uninstalled from the laptop, leaving me with just the Velo Reality training application. I tried to make the sessions in the garage less tedious with a second monitor on my laptop so I could watch Netflix whilst riding but it was, to be honest, soul destroying

As a result, in a moment of weakness I had a go with the free 1 week trial of Zwift. I was really reluctant to start paying especially as I knew I'd barely use it in the Summer. 

However what a revelation! It was incredibly involving, lots of people to draft and pass, a variety of "routes" and scenery. Within the first 3 rides I had shed my financial inhibitions and signed up - even at £12.99/month

Clearly there are many other sites about what Zwift is so I won't bother covering that ground again. 

For me the main thing is that it has, with no doubt made me fitter and stronger. I've ridden a combination of solo free rides, I've ridden in a number of meetups with other and I have ridden some of the more formal Zwift events (Fondos and Tour de Zwift) for example. Most of the time I have tried to push myself to an extent and I have seen the average power per ride creep up from around 160-170W at the start of November 2020 to just under 200W by mid January 2021. I have also moved my Zwift FTP from an initial measure of ~170W to 234W on an ascent of Alpe du Zwift (aka a virtual Alpe d'Huez - and averaging 240W for an hour on the big climbs. Whilst I am pushing more power on the flatter sections I still can't manage the level and duration on the climbs

To try and get some real data to prove if this perception of increased power since I started using Zwift, I used my Strava Data Tool to download my data and exported the ride summary data to Excel:

This tab of my tool is the Summary data

In Excel the graph of Power (Average Watts for the ride) looks like this

I have filtered out the rides with power <150W as these are mostly warm up and cool down rides. Anything above 150W means I am at least making at attempt and some effort. The data is pretty variable and reflects that at times I've probably been a bit fatigued. The 2 biggest average power rides are both an attempt at Alpe d'Zwift - the ride giving me an FTP of 234W.

I've added a linear trend line to the data which shows an increase of average power from around 165W at the start of my Zwift riding to around 190W as of the end of January 2021. This data certainly supports what I feel I can do. The R2 of the curve fit is pretty low however reflecting the high level of variability in the data so some caution must be used

Note the FTP values I have achieved is not a specific FTP test but processing of the continuous data. Here's that data (again from my tool):

Power is in Purple and you can see the scale from the screen shot - I managed to hold ~240W average all the way up apart from the corners

I moved on from my laptop and recycled an old desktop I had to put in the garage with twin monitors and new shelves:

After a week or so of using my laptop (whuich was only just up to the job I recycled an old desktop I had (with an Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.40GHz processor and a NVidia GTX460 graphics card). I thought this was going to be up to the job but it was only a bit better than my laptop. I have since replaced the desktop with a Beelink U57 Mini PC (from Amazon here) with Intel Core i5-5257u Processor and Intel Iris graphics. This is better than the desktop but the key thing is that running Zwift it only uses 25W vs the 125W plus of the desktop.

Here's the same view in my garage but with the Beelink:

 

 It's hard to spot the Beelink unit sitting on the shelf. I'll probably swap out the 2 off 17" monitors for 1 off 22" for the Zwift screen and an old 15" for the "other" stuff like Netflix etc

 

In terms of CPU performance this little box has the Core 2 Quad licked (data from https://www.cpubenchmark.net). The Beelink also has an M2 SSD and that is really fast:

The graphics performance differences are less clear (data from https://www.videocardbenchmark.net):

However in real life staring at a monitor whilst dripping sweat its difficult to see any difference between this Intel Iris and the GTX460. This is using the 1080p setting from Zwift. I think some of the quality settings are on the lower side

So at the moment I'll still be paying to ride Zwift and looking to get better performance out of myself as a result. 

And as well as the Zwift subscription I have bought shelving for the garage and a new computer - so much for saving money

Update of my Buffalo NAS LS220 Drive

Whilst I am a pretty keen cyclist and all this blog mainly seems to cover is either cycling related nonsense, or my efforts to write cycling related software, l do do a few other things. Here's a brief summary of when I updated the drives in my NAS (to store my cycling related software...)

I'm always nervous about the effort to recover one of my computers in the event of a hard drove failure so over the years have ensured that I have a fairly regular image backup. I've used a variety of tools - PowerQuest, MS Backup tool. Macrium etc. Doing a backup is one thing but obviously it's important to be able to store the images as well, so I have used various USB caddies with standard hard drives

A couple of years ago I got an Amazon voucher for moving Broadband supplier. With this I bought a Buffalo 200. This is a twin drive unit with a Gigabit ethernet interface and USB port for additional storage:

I had  a couple of spare 3.5" 500Gb drives which I set up as RAID 1 (mirrored) so I was up and running pretty quickly with the greater peace of mind of at least the better security of RAID 1 (other RAID configurations are both faster and more secure but for my application this was fine)

It worked OK and for most uses was fast enough. However whilst the NAS itself had Gbit ethernet my router was only 100Mbit. this meant that creating an 200Gbyte disk image direct to the NAS, or copying drive images from a USB caddy was, to say the least, a job of a number of hours. Therefore I just kept 2 or 3 of the most important images from one desktop one laptop and still relied on USB caddies for the images from various other computers

When I moved broadband supplier again, the new router was equipped with 5x 1Gbit ethernet ports, so the first thing I did was swap out the 100MBit switch I'd been using in my "home office" to a Gbit switch. The speed difference was marked - it seemed much more than 10x faster. This made managing images across the network much more practical. However now that it was easier to manage these big files, suddenly storing more images on the NAS was a problem as it was only 500Gbyte

However by coincidence I was able to "acquire" 2 off 1Tbyte 2.5" drives that were spare and could be re-allocated to the NAS drive. I backed up the contents of the NAS drive to an external USB caddy.

In order to use the 2.5" disks I bought a couple of 2.5"->3.5" adaptors:

These were about £8 each from EBay. I was surprised at the "quality" - the 2.5" drives fitted exactly in the cradle, no need to push into place, and all the holes lined up perfectly. Getting the 2.5" drive mounting screws in was a little fiddly as the drives are secured in the side holes so you don't have easy access to hold the screws in place.

Above it shows the 2 adaptors cradles with one of the 2.5" drives fitted. Basically these make a 2.5" drive appear physically identical to a 3.5" drive - the size, mounting holes and SATA connector location are all geometrically as per a 3.5" drive, as below:

I marked the original drives with which NAS caddy they were in so in the event of any issues I could replace the system exactly as per the original state, swapped out the 3.5" drives for the 2.5" drives in the adaptor cradles and refitted back to the NAS:

The photos above show the almost empty drive caddies when fitted with the 2.5" drives compared to 3.5" disks that completely fill it.

I powered the NAS backup and whilst it started, I could not log on to to configure it. The NAS Navigator software showed the state of the NAS as "Emergency mode":

Some Googling was required to see what was needed as I'd long since recycled the manual.

A manual is available here

Basically it meant pressing the "Function Button" (on the rear of my unit, circled in red) in order to trigger a new setup.

This took about 5 minutes after which I could log on. The initial menu forced me to set it up as 2 separate drives - as below:

After this step however I could go back to the configuration tool (via a Web browser) and configure the unit as a RAID 1 drive:

Although the Array was built in a few moments and the drive was usable, it then spent several hours "Synching" the array in the background.

Both the 2.5" drives were 3.0Gbps drives and I have not noticed any difference from the drive point of view

Nothing else was required and since the update the NAS has been hiding again in the cupboard out of sight where its kept next to the Broadband router

As an additional benefit, moving to these 2.5" drives does not just double the NAS storage capacity but also significantly saves power and money.

I put a few numbers into a Spreadsheet to try and quantify this:

The 3.5" drives needed about 20W total to operate vs the 2.5" drives needing only 8W total. Converting this to money with some assumptions, shows that for the 15 hours a day that my NAS runs for (it self powers off overnight), I'm going to save about £6-7/year. It's not going to buy me a new computer with those savings but all energy savings are worth having.