Xert, FasCat, Join.CC: Zwift Integration Has Arrived (& TrainerRoad teased)

Today Zwift announced a new expansion that includes a throwback to the days of the original Jarvis Island, the very first ~5km route where Zwift began. Though, this new road expansion adds that original pavement plus 6 new routes, including a grand unveiling that occurs the first time you ride the route, akin to an Indiana Jones stage show at Disneyland. All of which is cool (I gave it a ride, Zwift Jarvis that is), and I’m sure there will be a ton of coverage of that from GPLAMA, DesFit, and many others you can go watch.

See, neat, huh?

Here are a few other screenshots from my ride.

But again, hit up the various folks above for a deeper look at the new pavement.

New Workout API Integration:

Now, as the astute among you observed, the new Zwift roads are not the title of this post. Instead, the past few weeks have been busy for Zwift’s new structured workout API that lets 3rd party platforms push structured workouts to Zwift in mostly the same way that TrainingPeaks has been doing for 7 years. I say ‘mostly’, because behind the scenes, the code is different, but from a consumer standpoint, the end result is pretty darn similar. The core difference for consumers is that it’s very fast to update, letting platforms with fancier algorithms (or, what they market as AI), push workouts more dynamically.

Zwift announced this effort back in the spring, and obviously it got off to a much slower start than they anticipated – with basically just TriDot on it, till the last few weeks. That was no fault of everyone else, who were put into a holding pattern by Zwift while they worked through technology issues. But the last three weeks we’ve seen:

Xert launch: October 20th
FasCat launch: November 11th
Join launch: November 12th (today)

All three of these are notable in that they are all pushing far more dynamic workouts than TrainingPeaks has historically done. Specifically, all three push dynamically generated or customized workouts on the fly, based on your previous rides. Thus if you go out for a crazy hard unplanned ride the night before, all three platforms in some capacity might change the next day’s workout to account for that. And now, with the new API, you can execute those last-second changed workouts on the fly.

To demonstrate how a bit of this works, we’ll take a look at Xert, since I’ve long had an account there. In this case, you’ll go into the ‘Sync’ menu to add Zwift as a partner:

Zwift will confirm your relationship status with Xert:

And then you’ll see the new settings panel in Xert:

Now, in this case, if I select to AutoGen a workout for today, based on my ride history/profile and my ‘Continuous’ option in the settings (meaning, just keep making me faster without a specific race goal in mind), here’s what it spits out:

Within 3 seconds, that shows up in Zwift (despite already having Zwift open). Literally faster than I can switch back into Zwift. Also note that it’s included the FTP value from Xert (285w), versus my current Zwift FTP being set as 294w. That’s a very minor sounding update, but is something that is a big deal for all of these platforms that are constantly updating your FTP (and thus the power zones), for your structured workouts. If it had just used my Zwift FTP, then there would be a disconnect (and likely a much larger disconnect for most people who never update).

Had there been a set Xert scheduled workout, it too would have been automatically available in Zwift when I opened Zwift, without ever opening Xert.

Note that Zwift won’t update your existing FTP value to the Xert one, which might matter if you’re doing other workouts in Zwift that aren’t Xert-based.

Now, once you’re ready to go, you just tappity tap the route you want, and your Xert workout will appear just as any other Zwift workout:

The one thing that isn’t in Zwift, is the dynamically changing smart workouts that Xert has, whereby it’ll adjust the workout as you go through it. For those, you’ll still need to use the Xert platform directly. But otherwise, everything is pretty straightforward.

At the completion of your workout, it’ll sync from Zwift back to Xert your completed workout file, in the exact same way it syncs other platforms today.

All of this is essentially the exact same process/methodology for each of the other platforms that have signed onto Zwift’s training API. After all, that’s kinda the point: Having a structured way that partners can connect to Zwift and push workouts to it in a known and repeatable manner.

TrainerRoad Upcoming:

Of course, as cool as all these platforms above are, the simple reality is that the singular thing people keep screaming is: Cool, but what about TrainerRoad?

Like the other platforms, they too have been waiting on Zwift. But that train has finally started to board passengers and is getting ready to leave the station. CEO Nate Pearson published one of his Zwift rides, specifically noting the TrainerRoad workouts being automatically selected and pushed to his Zwift account (“Baxter -2” is the name of a relatively famous TrainerRoad workout):

While there aren’t any exact dates yet, in his comments, Nate says “ASAP”. Admittedly, that doesn’t give us a ton of context. After all, Zwift’s CEO said “SOON” as well, back in April. And we were all collectively told “SOON!!!!” to everyone having flying cars when we were growing up. Regrettably, none of this has happened.

That said, it sounds like Zwift has opened the doors a bit to allow these companies to now move as fast as they want, versus Zwift previously having a bit of a speed limiter onboarding partners to ensure the kinks were worked out (starting with smaller ones before going to bigger ones). That said, if TrainerRoad is just at the beginning of those Zwift opening those gates to them, it could be some time before we see it go live.

Thus hopefully, with those brakes removed, we’re now talking more of a ‘eggs gonna expire’ soon, rather than flying cars soon. With that – thanks for reading!

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