Throwback Thursday: the First Zwift Rides

February 13, 2020

LAST UPDATED February 13, 2020

Last week’s release of the updated my.zwift.com activity feeds gave us unique URLs for each Zwift activity. As long as a Zwifter hasn’t made their activity private, we can pull it up and see some of its details.

This makes for some interesting data sleuthing possibilities.

For example: what is activity #1, the very first one saved to Zwift’s system? Jon Mayfield riding on Jarvis Island of course! October 22, 2014: https://www.zwift.com/feed/1 (click the link and give the man a Ride On!)

The second activity is from Lloyd Murphy, Creative Director at Zwift, on that same day (https://www.zwift.com/feed/2) and Zwift Co-Founder Scott Barger logged the 3rd ride soon after (https://www.zwift.com/feed/3). I envision these guys sitting in some tiny Zwift office, smiling and high-fiving each other. “It’s working!”

Eric Min’s first saved activity was the next day: https://www.zwift.com/feed/10 and the rest, as they say, is history…

A Few More Notable Rides

Simon Schofield, voice of The Zwiftcast, was on quite early–the first non Zwift staffer to log a ride, in fact! https://www.zwift.com/feed/16
Here’s the first activity from Eric Chon, Community Support Manager at Zwift (he’s been helping Zwifters from day 1!): https://www.zwift.com/feed/17
Watopia launched on April 23, 2015 (probably late at night). Jarvis was turned off at that time, never to return. The first Watopia ride I could find (https://www.zwift.com/feed/100749) was from CJ Stoltie.
And the last Jarvis ride I found was from Brian Boyers: https://www.zwift.com/feed/100950
My friend Al Clewly’s first ride on Watopia: https://www.zwift.com/feed/100936 – he’s always been an outspoken fan of Zwift and a bit of a community organizer. I first met him when he started posting monthly challenges on the Zwift Riders Facebook group.
Here’s my very first Zwift ride – a short test on November 9, 2015: https://www.zwift.com/feed/442661 (Note: this activity page doesn’t want to load, for some reason. In fact, many of my older activities are behaving in this way.)

Growth Stats

One way to measure growth is to see how many activities occured. Zwift has easy access to all this data, of course, but we can have a little as well. For example: how many days did it take the Zwift Community to complete 10,000 activities?

It took 90 days to go from activity #1 thru 10,000
It took 18 days to go from activity #10,000 to 20,000
It took 9 days to go from activity #100,000 to ~110,000
It took 2 days to go from activity #500,000 to 510,000
It took just 1 day to go from activity #~1,000,000 (January 19, 2016) to ~1,010,000

Some time between June 9-22, 2019 Zwift changed the numbering scheme on their activities. I know this because my June 9th activity ID (47699797) is quite different from June 22nd (312930753894291680). I’m not sure how the new IDs work, although it appears to be just an index, with some additional numbers tacked onto the end.

Do Some Sleuthing!

Poke around and see what interesting activities you can find. How about the first Richmond ride? What ID was YOUR first ride? It may take a lot of clicking to find out, but share below!