Damn, you are on to me! I messed up getting ready for the 830am ZHQ race which only had about 10 people in. Joined the 1330 one which was busier and was doing really well until it got strung out on the last lap. The importance of positioning. Also did a casual 66 mile yesterday which had a amazing attendance at the start.
There seems to be more and more 'endurance' type group rides on there at the moment, but also 'less' races. I mean there are still a bunch on there but the numbers seem to be getting more and more condensed into 'popular' races than spread around like previously.
But does mean you can pick and choose your races if you want 'wins' - like me doing a saturday evening, long hilly ride
gets a nice 1st place. But the reality is coming in early 10 minutes in front of 2nd place on a hard course at an 'unpopular' time to ride is just ego fluffing ('racing' against 6 others in C and the 2 up front getting DQ).
Getting into some of the competitive stuff and a
5th in a FRR stage race (vs 43 others in C), or a
3rd in ZRL (vs 77) or
10th in ZRL (vs 74) should be more impressive. But people only look down your profile for wins!
Any recommendations for heart rate monitors to link up? Or anyone recommendations/tips in general for a new zwifter
Good work on the setup, you'll likely (using a HT) need to push the 'difficulty slider' right up to try and get some 'speed' out of the groupset. The gearing on that bike being made for trails/off-road not fast on-road.
I’d perhaps recommend AGAINST a Wahoo Tickr.
My first one, the original failed after about 3 years which was fine, I bought a Tickr2 which the strap broke after 3 months, replaced under warranty and now the second one seems like it’s on its way out.
My 7 year old (original) TICKR would disagree. Will admit I changed the strap (for an £11 Amazon one) last year, but 5 years out of a strap was probably 2 years too long, it wasn't losing any accuracy from it - just a poor fit.
I'd happily buy another TICKR. Wahoo also have one of the best supports in the business. I think Garmin are generally ok now, but they did have a few years where their chest straps had issues so people where buying other 'solid' straps to use with them. Still more money than the TICKR.
I use a Whoop band for HR as I like how it measures my other activities. Expensive - yes. The best - yes
Great advice other than this bit, Whoop are ok (currently half way through waiting my 16 weeks delivery time for mine),
but they're quite far from being the 'best'.
They're not as accurate as generally any of the chest strap HRM's. But you don't buy a Whoop to be just a HRM.
After a bit of advice if possible.
The gym has some Wattbikes. I've finally worked out how to connect it to my phone for Zwift purposes. The issue being that i've connected it as a power meter, so i missed the cadence info. Not a huge deal but i'm also missing HR data which is a bigger issue.
I generally just use my Garmin for workout purposes and so record on that. Sometimes with a chest strap and sometimes without. Am i better to take my HR strap with me and connect it to my phone, and then is it possible for my phone to handle 2 connections (Iphone SE), i vaguely recall an issue years ago with an Apple TV where there were limits to the number of connections it could handle.
My other question comes with changing resistence, there's no option for Zwift to adjust the wattbike that the gym uses, there's just an airwheel with a slider similar to the Concept 2 rowing machines. As such it's a bit awkward to change resistance mid ride and i don't know where it's best to set it. Too low and i can't put power down when i want to without smashing a huge RPM, too high and i'm at a stupidly low cadence when i'm just pottering around.
Trying to workout whether it's worth persevering with or to just give up. For reference i'm not too bothered about racing as it'll be used on an erratic schedule, more just something to make it a little more interesting. I generally hate indoor cardio and so when i intend to do an hour, i get bored and do around 20 minutes!
Yes Apple can only handle 2 BT devices at a time. As the Wattbike will only connect as a power source, then see if it appears as a cadence source too? Sometimes the single BT stream will include cadence, so you could then get power & cadence & HR showing. But for you I'd say connect the HR and the PWM, then see if it allows you to connect (or even shows) a cadence sensor. It likely won't, or Zwift will tell you 'you have too many connections' when trying to connect it.
One way around that could be to use 'Mobile Link' where you can connect 2 devices to your handset (or companion app on it) which then broadcasts them as 1 stream to another device where you would combine the 3rd. But we're talking phone and then also using an AppleTV. At a guess you're just using your phone at the gym? No real way around that, limitation of Apple/iOS I'm afraid. You can get 3rd party devices which would combine data streams to then broadcast to the iphone, think there's even a HRM which will. Although generally find people using them when they have ANT+ devices which don't broadcast on BT and need to convert (as again Apple/iOS only support BT and not ANT+).
As for the resistance, unless the Wattbike shows as a 'Controllable' trainer there's nothing you can do (as it means they're not ERG or FEC compatible). You'll have to continue to manually adjust to get the resistance required for what you need.
) and would then try and cling on up the 0.3mi climb to the finish. It worked well, I switched the camera round to see behind and I was just able to hold out to the finish to take the win. My HR averaged 160 and hit 186 on the climb to the end, which I'm not sure I've ever seen so high! 
