Creating a meetup in Zwift for today’s bike ride went smoothly. When I opened the desktop program the usual screens came up and after pairing I chose Ride. The “Join Event” link was there and I joined the meetup I created. No problem today. The ride went as planned although there was a lot of climbing, for me anyway. The live stream was not as successful. I use OBS Studio to send the stream to YouTube. Around 41 minutes in OBS Studio stopped sending the video to YouTube and it closed the live stream. Thus the video above is not the complete ride.

This one of my longer Zwift rides this year at 1:23:56. I wasn’t sure how many times I would go up the big climb but I thought 3 was plenty. One of the features of a meetup is all of the other Zwifters on the route. When I opened the companion app over 26,000 people were in Zwift. I was there because it was 44 degrees outside and I didn’t want to ride outside.

The route for today’s Zwift meetup followed the Makuri Islands Spirit Forest Route. This was the first time for me on this route producing the badge. I set the distance to 15 miles, longer than one lap. Checking ZwiftInsider.com the route basics looked good, “Length: 8.4 km (5.2 miles), Elevation: 134 m (440‘), Lead-In: 4 km (2.5 miles). Based on that riding 15 miles took me up the 300 foot climb 3 times. With all of the dirt/gravel surface I probably should’ve switched to the gravel bike in my Zwift garage but I didn’t. Overall I climbed 1,322 feet and at times my speed dropped to 3 or 4 mph grinding up the hill. The profile for a lap looks like this at VeloViewer.com.

Strava includes two segments for this route and I garnered a top result on each one: PR on Spirit Forest (28:25), 2nd fastest time on Spirit Forest (29:22). Not sure why there are 2 segments with the same name.