Interview with John Barter, ZZRC Ride Leader

A note from Eric: I recently published a post about the best slow group rides on Zwift. John Barter’s ZZRC rides were near the top of the list, so I interviewed him to learn more about himself and the ZZRC rides. 

First, a little about yourself. Where are you from, and how would you describe yourself as a cyclist?
I am a born again Essex boy cyclist now living near Oxford. I was cycling mad when I was a child and and into late teens. I was into all sports then all of a sudden you meet girls and have parties. Then work and more work. Then a wife a children appear, so even more work and before I knew it I was in my 40’s? Aaaaaargh.

Then I was very ill and this lasted for a period of ten years. My surgeons then told me to get fit again to improve my health. I was very limited in sport due to my injuries, but then one day I walked past a cycle shop. “That’s it,” I thought to myself and never looked back since.

I am not a racing cyclist, but more of a fitness come casual rider. I love touring around the south west countryside. I do a lot of charity rides and did a 5000km challenge on Zwift for “Children with Cancer UK” and raised £3000. I am also doing this year’s ride London 100 for the same charity.

Tell me about the slow rides you lead. When do they happen, how long are the rides, what sort of pace do you hold, etc.
ZZRC Europe promotes two pace groups every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

We have just newly Introduced ZZRCAR (America’s ride) and it is growing fast. These events are run on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

The groups’ paces are either sub 2.0 (average speed 19-23mph) or sub 3.0 (average speed 21-26mph) and the rides last around 1 hour.

How many riders have you been seeing on your ride lately?
We are averaging around 150 to 250 riders per session. And our highest was 625 for the first “Zwift in the New Year” event and I believe we crashed the system (Oops, sorry guys!)

Some group rides on Zwift have been around for quite a while, while others are relatively new. How long have your rides being going? What was the inspiration behind starting them?
We were Zwift born on December 2015. Having minor disabilities I realised there seemed to be no casual groups on Zwift for the disabled, beginners, young and the older generation at that time. After a few investigations and questions within the community I confirmed there were no such groups, so I introduced ZZRC into the scene.

We were just a group of 5 waddling around Watopia at a sub 2.0 pace. One year later we are now a popular group with 1800 members. We also host the now Yearly ZZRC Xmas pace n race party which had a great turnout with all the Zwift HQ turning up and loads of other top names in the cycling world. This was a super event where the social goups met with the pros.

Many group rides are run by a team–sweepers helping those off the back, different leaders rotating responsibilities, even others helping to advertise the ride, etc. Who helps make your rides happen?
ZZRC have grown into and large professional team. We have a separate leader group page now and the amount of admin and organising is huge. I have a great team of 15 guys and gals helping run the events. I cannot praise them enough. We spend a lot of our free time organising these super events. We also have regular volunteers who help sweep for us to.

As a side note, Zwift’s own Mike McCarthy has kindly accepted to be an Honorary Member and will occasionally lead an event from time to time.

Do you have problems with “flyers” zooming off the front of your rides? How do you handle that situation?
Errrrrrrr no comment 🙂 . Yes this is quite regular but we have learned to ignore them now and let them go 🙂

It is a lot better now you can see the leader beacon more and read texts at a further distance.

Does your ride use Discord for audio communication? If so, how can folks get in on that
Yes we use Discord: https://discord.gg/xN5dEBF

Sub 2.0 is a fun social group and there are mad guys and gals on here, we tell jokes and sing, it’s a real family group and we have fun. Sub 3.0 is a bit more quiet probably due to saving air.

As you know, we’ve got lots of new folks joining the Zwift community. What would you recommend to anyone who wants to try your ride, but has never done a Zwift group ride before?
Just to join our Facebook group. We have loads of information on our files tab. Give us a try on sub 2.0 and do not worry about being dropped, there are no rules with ZZRC. We have a “do what you can” attitude and have fun. We also do one-to-one rides with people who are in need of rehab, regaining fitness or disabled people who just need a chaperone to go around with.

Zwift has come a long way in the last year with the event module, leader beacon, etc. What other upgrades could Zwift roll out to make your group rides even better?
I think Zwift are working all the time to make the module better. Three ideas I would like see is:

1. I would love to see a laser beam introduced that goes across the road to stop guys passing the leader.
2. Also there is a problem when the leader gets ejected from the server, when he/she rejoins they cannot text…
3. Would be nice to let the admins of groups to have access to book leaders on events, sometimes we have last minute changes due to circumstances. This would very helpful so we do not have a leaderless event.

Interview with Steve Clogg, PAC Ride Leader

A note from Eric: I recently published a post about the best slow group rides on Zwift. Steve Clogg’s PAC rides were at the top of the list, so I decided to interview him and learn more about himself and the rides. 

First, a little about yourself. Where are you from, and how would you describe yourself as a cyclist?
I’m based in the UK and have always lived around the Surrey area. I ride MTB bikes and don’t own a single road machine so my pedals will always be flat and skid lids will always have a visor.

Tell me about the slow rides you lead. When do they happen, how long are they, what sort of pace do you hold, etc.
PAC currently runs 4 easy-paced social rides covering the 1.5 to 2.3 w/kg range.  Each ride is about 1 hour long and the only feature that varies is the pace. We also set a maximum flat pace on each ride where possible to control the group draft so the sweeper teams can operate successfully and help bring riders back to the group.

• PAC 1.5w/kg (1.4-1.6w/kg) – Great introduction to group riding.
  Wednesday @ 18:30 GMT
• PAC SUB2 (1.6-1.9w/kg) – A true sub2 ride that matches its description.
  Tuesday @ 19:00 GMT
• PAC Social (1.9-2.3w/kg) – Next step up but still at a comfortable social pace.
  Thursday @ 18:45 GMT, Saturday 16:00 GMT
• PAC SUB2 v The Mountain (1.6-1.9w/kg) – Our longest ride at 90 minutes and the most popular. Why should all the faster riders have all the fun!
  Every 2/3 weeks – Day / time can vary

How many riders have you been seeing on your rides lately?
We are hitting 300+ on some rides now, numbers have really picked up over the northern hemisphere winter months.

Some group rides on Zwift have been around for quite a while, while others are relatively new. How long have your rides being going? What was the inspiration behind starting them?
I joined Zwift back in December 2015 and soon realised the social side of the platform was its greatest feature. I started doing some group rides with PAC, SUB2, WSR and ZZRC and soon ended up helping ZZRC as a ride leader and admin. Then work got super busy and I had to back out for a few months.

Finally, work eased off again and I was looking for a new challenge that fitted my schedule. The PAC Saturday ride was one of Zwift’s longest running rides founded by Jonathon Lemon way back in the beta days. Bob MacKnew then took over the ride in April 2016 and created the PAC Facebook group. I then came aboard to help with the admin side. After a look at the schedule, we added a 2nd ride on Thursdays as there was not a single easy-paced ride for the community on that day.

A few months later we asked Joachim Taelman if he wanted to bring his popular sub2 ride into the PAC family, which he did, growing our group size again.

Next with Christmas approaching I noticed no one was offering mountain rides for the slower riders, so SUB2 v The Mountain was created as a Christmas special on Boxing day. It was a massive success so we have now added it as an event every few weeks.

Finally, Bob introduced a 1.5w/kg ride to the schedule as no other group was offering a well organised weekly event inside the ride module. Again, it was a huge success and several other groups have now added similar rides, so the Zwift community at large is the better for it. So well done to Bob, great idea.

Many group rides are run by a team–sweepers helping those off the back, different leaders rotating responsibilities, even others helping to advertise the ride, etc. Who helps make your ride happen?
We believe having set leaders for each ride adds consistency to the events and it makes it easier to run to a schedule. We do help cover each other and have a 4th ride leader in Tony Richardson to ensure we always have someone available. We also have a very large sweeper team, too many to name here and they do a fantastic job helping at the back and are the real secret to our success.

I handle all the marketing and Bob looks after the Strava Club as running a large group is a lot of work especially when you have over 2300 members.

Do you have problems with “flyers” zooming off the front of your rides? How do you handle that situation?
That situation has actually improved over the last few weeks due to the ride leader finally being removed from the performance filter Zwift employs. I noticed this problem months ago when our group sizes increased past 100 riders and the leader beacon would vanish if you were off the front or back. Also, messaging only travelled to the 100 closest riders, so anyone outside that could not see the leader’s messages. Recently I managed to talk to Jon Mayfield about the issue along with the other ride leaders. Once he realised what had happened, the issue was fixed within 24 hours. So now anyone off the front is not really interested in group rides, so I just ignore them.

Does your ride use Discord for audio communication? If so, how can folks get in on that?
We use Discord as it adds to the whole social side of the ride and it’s great for communication between the ride leader and the sweeps. It’s super simple to install the app on the platform of your choice and click the server join link. All our ride leaders have admin powers to mute members if they have open mics and are flooding the channel, so hopefully new users will get a great experience when connected to the PAC channel. We also encourage new riders to the platform to ask questions as it’s much easier to answer via audio as we ride along.

As you know, we’ve got lots of new folks joining the Zwift community. What would you recommend to anyone who wants to try your ride, but has never done a Zwift group ride before?
Join our Facebook group and ask any question you have there, we will be glad to help. Also there is this website called Zwift Insider that might have a few tips 😉

Zwift has come a long way in the last year with the event module, leader beacon, etc. What other upgrades could Zwift roll out to make your group rides even better?
There are still a few big issues Zwift needs to fix in the event module. First, is to display the event description when you join a ride, so riders know exactly what is expected on the event. Second is to remove the 100 rider filtering from the overlay so everyone can see where all the riders are in the event. The third one relates to messaging. Zwift did a great job removing the leader from the filtering so everyone can see the leader messages again. But this only works one way, so any riders out the back or front in events can’t message back, this needs to change.

Anything else you’d like to add?
It’s the Zwift community that makes our rides great and without their support sweeping, answering questions and providing feedback, we would struggle to run these huge events. Finally, thanks to Eric, Jon, Charlie and the whole Zwift team for providing us with this great platform and I look forward to see what is coming in the future.