Anticipating a cool front arriving during my usual outdoor bike ride time I opted to ride around on Zwift with a group of bikers in a an Italian Social Ride.

The ride started at 11:30 AM and I fell to the rear of the group but not behind the red beacon at the back of the group. As I warmed up I changed gears and increased my watts up to the 1.5 W/Kg target for the group. That moved me up some but when I looked at the other bikers around me (the box on the right side of the screen) I saw some in front of me in the 2.5 W/Kg range and I changed to a higher gear to move up.

Early in the ride the group consisted of 222 riders but more joined as the ride progressed bumping the total to over 268.

One hill awaited and the leader told the bikers to regroup on the climb up the 6% hill which I did. The hill appeared twice during the ride. Also the rain I missed outdoors fell on us indoors too though I didn’t get wet.

Later in the ride I saw the red beacon rider (who is supposed to be the back of the group sweeper) race forward in front of the fence. Not sure why he was there. The yellow beacon ride leader was not at the front of the group for most of the ride. He removed the fence with 5 minutes to go.

The jersey auto-selected for the ride which put everyone looking alike and difficult to tell myself from others near me. Different jerseys would help like real rides where the jerseys vary widely.

The Open Broadcast Software (OBS) program captured the ride and uploading to YouTube.com the video came out as good as my monitor looked and with sound while I listened to disco music during the ride.