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://zwift.com/feed/1 (click the link and give the man a Ride On!)
Read more about the Zwift origin story >
The second activity is from Lloyd Murphy, Creative Director at Zwift, on that same day (https://zwift.com/feed/2) and Zwift Co-Founder Scott Barger logged the 3rd ride soon after (https://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://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://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://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://zwift.com/feed/100749) was from CJ Stoltie.
- And the last Jarvis ride I found was from Brian Boyers: https://zwift.com/feed/100950
- My friend Al Clewly’s first ride on Watopia: https://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://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!
This is fascinating. I was part of the beta, and did my first ride 2/2/15 which was #16,034. I wondered how many rides there were before me. Pretty amazing to see how Zwift has completely changed indoor riding within such a short amount of time.
It’s coming up to the 1 year anniversary of my 1st Zwift ride. The ID number for that ride is 40000740.
My first and so far only century – https://zwift.com/feed/362900639359022624. Took a day off from work when the rest of the family was out of town for the week! 😉
My first ride, 12/25/2018 https://zwift.com/feed/32184857
Look at all those achievements!
Excellent sleuthing my man! 🙂 I still lament not joining Zwift earlier when I first saw all those frog shaped island rides appearing on my Strava feed. Watopia had already launched and Jarvis just a memory by the time I got my ass in gear and signed up…
You and me both! I never got to ride Jarvis. 🙁
Any chance Jarvis will come back? That would be cool for a Zwift anniversary.
It still exists. I’m not sure why Zwift doesn’t open it back up. I agree. It would be cool to ride!
My first ride was on 1/6/15 https://zwift.com/feed/5765 . I did it a few times but found trainerroad.com to fit my needs better back then. Friends said “man you really should check zwift out again” after 4 years of being away. I wish I would have stuck it out and would more and likely have the tron bike by now. Haha
Mine was https://zwift.com/feed/270008 on Richmond on the 9th of August 2015 according to this record. Despite that I stuck around 😉. I did ride Jarvis on a friend’s rig and I’m pretty sure my first rides on my own kit was on Watopia before this date.
Nothing happens when I click the activities though. Should it?
Not August 9th, September! Richmond released… I think September 2, 2015.
Hi Mr McTobeface,
I think the site has stopped working. It was loading up activities earlier.
I remember your first Jarvis ride on my Zwift account. You being about 6 inches taller than me but having to use my bike which was way too small for you. The link to that ride was…
https://zwift.com/feed/35093
Brandon
What? No comments yet that on that first Zwift ride Jon Mayfield rode 4/10 of a Mille in 14 seconds? Man, he was cruising! These days there would be forum posts galore about the ‘flier’ that went screaming by! 🤪
My wife and I have just passed our 5 year Zwift anniversary’s!
2/17/15 number 26409 for me.
My first Jarvis island ride was back on December 20th 2014 and was ride number 2462.
https://zwift.com/feed/2462
Strava URL – https://www.strava.com/activities/231094840
Is there a quick way to scroll down to my first ride? I have been riding since beta mode on Jarvis, have almost 10 million “drops” and five minutes of scrolling down only gets me back to 2019.
I haven’t found a quick way. I just clicked for about… 5 minutes.
Got there eventually https://zwift.com/feed/17293, February 2015
It appears that the last digits on the fit file link match up from your ZwiftPower activity list. Easy to search that way…
My first ride was ID# 3596043, November 28, 2016. Such a great platform for me.
There it is … #36976. I was Sufferfesting and couldn’t be bothered with the beta. Until about the 10th time I saw an article about it
Was taking too long to scroll through the Zwift activity log, so I went to Training Peaks and found my first Zwift ride was 26 May 2015 on my CompuTrainer. It was 1 hr 22 min and 46.2 km with 352 m of elevation (wasn’t much to climb back then). I believe at the time there was a waiting list as they were worried about overloading the system if they allowed too many people on the app too fast.
Ride #54700 on 3/11/15, took a while for me to latch on though. Smart trainer really helped that for me. Zero of my early rides will load though.
This is great, thanks for sharing! I was part of the beta. My 1st ride on Zwift was a lap of Jarvis on 3/11/2015, number 52548. My 1st ride on Watopia was 7/20/2015. Unfortunately, none of these early rides will load.
It’s been quite the journey. Zwift has single handedly changed indoor training forever!
My first recorded ride was apparently on Jarvis Island, 11/30/2014, id # 1043: https://zwift.com/feed/1043. Details don’t come up, though.
My first ride 9th Feb 2015 – https://zwift.com/feed/20746. Just 2.5 km on my Cycleops fluid trainer. I remember it being a real pleasure to ride with visual feedback whilst grinding on the turbo. I those beta days I could get sprint jersey during my early morning ride. Not any more!
Without paging all the way back to April 2015… https://www.strava.com/activities/281876936
80658, turns out, though that one does not seem to be viewable. 82776 looks like my second Zwift, first on Strava. Many earlier adopters, obviously.
My first Zwift ride was on Jarvis on Jan. 7, 2015 https://zwift.com/feed/5808 and my first ride on Waptopia was Apr. 25, 2015 https://zwift.com/feed/102565. Like most others, the data doesn’t want to load.
My first ride was 3/26/15. But going back before that I remember Jon ‘s post on slowtwitch. I recognized he was onto something big and I added my two cents to his thread. Five years and 14,305 zwift miles later I’m still hammering away. Thank you Jon
My first ride was 22nd June 2015, does anyone remember the Zwift aeroplane that took us from Jarvis to the new world! WATOPIA?
https://twitter.com/hashtag/GoodbyeJarvisIsland?src=hashtag_click
WOW, I rode Jarvis and never knew it! My first ride was back on 9th March 2015 https://zwift.com/activity/51549 I did a total of 6 rides on Jarvis and then my first Watopia ride being later that year on 28th October. My first ride of Richmond was 8th November 2015 Then did a bunch for a while getting fit for a heart operation until April 2016, but then had to stop for recovery reasons. Back at it now since Jan 2020 and loving the improvements. I can’t wait for the club updates, can’t come soon enough for my liking. I still,… Read more »
Nice article, memories a plenty! My first ride on Zwift was on Oct 21 2015 and Richmond on Nov 8. Had no idea at the time those were pretty early rides i’d go back to someday! Even though I can’t open the details of 2015 rides, it’s still cool to revisit how it all began.