Making Indoors More Achievable: Community and Competition
As Eric alluded to in his article about indoor training powering his summer goals, proper indoor training equipment can make the transition between seasons far easier. Between rocker plates or Axis feet, adjustable height, and rollers, there’s more options than ever to help mimic the road inside and make your indoor experience a better one. (I, a self-admitted luddite, have even caved and moved to a KICKR with AXIS Action-feet to give at least a little bit of movement to the thing.)

That said, though, the hardware is only part of the experience. It’s the software side that makes it all come alive. Whether it’s in-game rewards, or realistic ride previews, or riding together in a large group, it’s what winds up controlling your trainer that turns indoor riding into something more than staring at numbers for hours on end. For those of us who remember just looking at graph ride profiles, a vertical bar, and watts for days on end like the original RacerMate software to go with CompuTrainers…we’ve come a long, long way.
From my experience as both an athlete as a coach, there are two common motivators that lead to successful indoor training campaigns:
- Being a part of a broader community of like-minded individuals;
- Itching the scratch that is competition, no matter how that competition is structured.
With that in mind, I think there are two online platforms that excel at supporting these two motivators.
Velocity: For the Community-Minded Rider

If you’re the type of person that craves Masters swim workouts, or your local run or cycling club ride: Velocity is the indoor training platform that you are looking for.
I mean this in absolutely the best way possible: take a Peloton class and its motivating tactics, and add in the advanced analysis and gamification of cycling (or lifting) mechanics, and you’ve got Velocity. Velocity offers community rides with their own coaches, as well as more “private” community rides if your coach or cycling club offer them. You get the ability to see all of your friends with the on-board video. And then there’s all of the data at your fingertips, ready for your (or your coach’s) analysis after the fact.

Best of all, it has the longest free test period of any of the indoor platforms, with a 45 day free trial which includes any of these community rides and hooking up your favorite training tracking platform in. We recently hosted two Community Rides on Velocity, and will look to have a few more in the future.
Zwift: To Scratch the Racing Itch
As much as I enjoy training with others, it’s taken my the past five years to understand that if I am going to extract the most of myself in any training session, I’ve got to turn it into some type of competition.
Let me give you an example: every Saturday is my SkiMo training day while the kiddo is at her ski program. I’ll try to get as many laps of the entire mountain in as I can in that three hour window. If I’m to get three full laps in, I need to be up and down in under an hour. And by far the best motivator for that: find someone else going up the hill, and chase them down. Then the next one. And so on and so forth.

For me, that’s Zwift racing in a nutshell. It’s trying to find that person that, no matter what it takes, you will not let pass you. There’s no other platform that offers such a robust competitive environment to work through. Sometimes that’s a disadvantage, of course; the current Tour du Zwift is meant to be a group ride, and instead it is always a race. It requires a little bit of a discipline to not always choose an event (which is why, well, I have both Velocity and Zwift; it gives the best of both worlds).
Ultimately — choosing an indoor training platform is an exercise in figuring out what keeps you coming back for more.
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