With the group rides being limited by early nights, and many of us venturing indoors to train, how can we keep our cycling social during this time?
(Image credit: David Stockman / Getty Images)
With more and more riders venturing indoors for their cycling over the winter, it can be at times difficult to remain social in the virtual cycling world. However it’s important to keep the social aspect of things; we are social animals after all, and with new technology comes new ways to keep things social.
Indoor riding can be quite solitary, but there are ways to make it more social with a bit of effort (Image credit: Zwift)
How to keep it social indoors
One of the largest indoor cycling platforms is Zwift. This app offers riders the opportunity to ride with thousands of other cyclists at the same time, and does feature some specific social elements such as the chat function, as well as a huge amount of group workouts, races, and social rides that you can join.
The Pace Partner function also helps ensure that you can ride with a group of the same relative ability as you as you can select which Pace Partner you ride with by watts per kilogram (W/Kg). So if you know your comfortable cycling speed for a Zone 2 ride is 2 W/Kg, you can select to ride with a group maintaining that average power.
Having spent a lot of time on Zwift over the years, I’ve made several friends over Zwift both in the UK and internationally. I’ve even ended up meeting up for rides with some of them out on the real world roads. Afterall, most of us on Zwift already share a common interest for cycling.
You can also use Zwift to keep in touch with real life riding buddies. Zwift has a meetups feature so you can ride and text with your mates and even features a no-drop element so that you can keep everyone together. To keep things even more social, the likes of Discord or WhatsApp group calls mean you can have the social ride chat even in the virtual world.
Zwift, and many other platforms, feature virtual group ride functionality (Image credit: Josh Ross)
For those missing the fast paced group rides of the summer, you can always organise with your friends specific Zwift races to enter as a group and see who gets the bragging rights in your race-within-a-race. You can also work together as a team to take it in turns working for one rider to try and get them the win. This is something I used to do during lockdown with my teammates, and made for some great fun and team bonding even when we weren’t able to do so in person.
Even for those not using Zwift where you can ride together virtually, you can still use group chat apps to keep in touch while you’re doing your own indoor rides. Be that a steady hour of Zone 2, or doing intervals. You might just have to mute yourself breathing heavily during any higher intensity efforts.
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A good time to do this for any groups who work from home might be during a 'virtual commute' either before or after work. You can always meet up after these virtual rides for a real life coffee and cake as well, give the virtual group ride that real café ride experience without having to get totally soaked, freezing, or play with the traffic in the dark.
Riding outside in terrible weather can be miserable even with company. (Image credit: Getty Images)
How to keep it social outdoors
We can of course continue to ride outdoors, but a problem with the weather getting worse can be gathering the group motivation to ride in wintery weather.
My old local group ride found a useful way to boost motivation, which was to enforce a mudguards rule for the winter training rides. The best road bike mudguards are definitely full coverage ones, and they ensure that people would not have to worry about enduring hours of road filth and muck being sprayed up into their faces by the wheel in front. We also changed from doing the same loop each week to doing a different one each time so as to keeps things fresh and also discover some new roads.
Decent, full length mudguards are a courtesy to other riders as well as keeping you dry (Image credit: Velo Orange)
There is of the course the staple of group rides, which is the café stop. However, even if you don’t want to do the entire winter training ride, you can always work out with a group when the proposed café stop is and meet up with them for that part of the ride. You could even set up just a specific meetup at a café that’s fairly central to a group of you, and then ride out just to meet up there.
For those getting slightly tired of the same old same old throughout the winter season, giving a new discipline a go is a great way of keeping things interesting as well as social. With the boom in gravel riding, a heap of new trails with no threat of road traffic are open to explore with other riders.
Cyclocross and mountain biking present other opportunities for social riding while achieving some new skills. Track cycling is another great place to ride with groups and can avoid the winter weather for those looking to do that. All of these different cycling disciplines can also lead to meeting with and riding with new groups of people and building up your cycling community.
Freelance cycling journalist Andy Turner is a fully qualified sports scientist, cycling coach at ATP Performance, and aerodynamics consultant at Venturi Dynamics. He also spent 3 years racing as a UCI Continental professional and held a British Cycling Elite Race Licence for 7 years. He now enjoys writing fitness and tech related articles, and putting cycling products through their paces for reviews. Predominantly road focussed, he is slowly venturing into the world of gravel too, as many ‘retired’ UCI riders do.
When it comes to cycling equipment, he looks for functionality, a little bit of bling, and ideally aero gains. Style and tradition are secondary, performance is key.
He has raced the Tour of Britain and Volta a Portugal, but nowadays spends his time on the other side of races in the convoy as a DS, coaching riders to race wins themselves, and limiting his riding to Strava hunting, big adventures, and café rides.
