Following the first race in the new Zwift Duathlon League (ZDL) race on February 17, we caught up with Martin Carew, the mastermind behind WTRL and the ZDL latest series, to see how it went.
Martin says the event was a “resounding success.” There were some 2000 registered participants, making it one of the largest running events ever on Zwift.
The event format was praised. The 35-minute bike segment was challenging, followed by a 10-minute transition period which allowed people sufficient time to change from their cycling shoes to their trainers. The run event of 15 minutes made it accessible to all participants of differing ability. In some cases people opted against using a treadmill, instead wearing a footpod and running outside, Zwift in hand.
It is clear that WTRL have got the balance correct in terms of timings of the components with one participant stating that that they “love the fact it is only an hour. Just long enough to be painful but short enough to fit into most schedules.”
Across the growing community, helped by the launch of the new WTRL’s new Zwift’s Duathlon Facebook page, the feedback from participants has been overwhelmingly positive:
“The Zwift Duathlon series is the perfect way to motivate yourself back into racing, with a nice short sharp race time and accommodating race slots for all athletes.”
“The hardest I went in a long while! It might be “only” 35 and then 15 minutes, but there is no pause during the race, no downhill, no draft, no help only biking as hard as you can and then running even harder. Brutal. Awesome. More please.”
Results Issues
The only issue is that there has been a delay in the official results, which the WTRL team summarized to competitors in an e-mail:
WTRL and Zwift have been working together to streamline the process in which Zwifters race and participant data is exchanged. This will lead to faster, more accurate results in the future and we are keen to ensure the whole of season 1 is working from this data. Please bear with us while we transition and as soon as the Race 1 Results are available (aiming for before Race 2), we will be in touch!
We appreciate this isn’t ideal and thank you for your patience while we work on getting this right rather than have issues later in to this brand new format of racing that is only going to get bigger!
WTRL recently posted an update on the results processing to their Facebook page:
At the current time we are STILL not in a position to provide results for Race 1 nor Race 2 results for the Zwift Duathlon League.
Despite many weeks of very successful event testing jointly with Zwift, discussions, web and software development – the current state of Zwift game/race data available is (in all honesty) very poor to non-existent making results almost impossible at this time.
There were hopes that this would have been resolved last week with a new data source for us to use (since ZwiftPower is fundamentally broken) but the latest update received by WTRL (yesterday) from Zwift engineers is that another issue has taken priority. This is incredibly disappointing news to us here at WTRL and to the Zwift team that have been working very hard collaboratively to bring this brand new event format to Zwifters.
We are still hopeful that we may be able to rescue the situation but this remains very firmly in the hands of Zwift’s engineering team to fix. We will bring you a further update by Friday of this week.
Yours very sincerely,
A very disappointed WTRL and Zwift crew
So, some very concerning delays/issues with results data but ultimately, the event itself went to plan and the format was well-received. Once the data exchange process is fixed, the event should be very efficient and results posted quickly.
Here’s hoping Zwift’s engineers can get race data flowing to WTRL quickly!
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