The new, 2022 Zwift Duathlon Series begins in Wednesday and runs for 4 weeks. This is meaningful personally, because I have races that matter beginning in April and I can’t just show up cold turkey. Tune-up races that don’t cause too much disruption in my training are not easy to come by, and these events serve the purpose perfectly.

I did the first two Zwift Duathlons last year (there are 4 in a “season”) before I damaged a high-hamstring changing a truck tire. I’d like to say my dodgy hamstring is mostly behind me, but in truth my hamstring is always behind me. Anyway, I’m baaa-aack! and ready to go again.

The equipment requirements are certainly high: smart trainer and treadmill. It turns out quite a few of you meet that high bar. Here is the format for those who don’t know: 35 minutes on your smart trainer, followed exactly 10 minutes later by a 15-minute treadmill run. You need one additional piece of hardware for this: something that transmits heart rate. This is an anti-cheat device, which is certainly not tamper-proof, but is designed to keep folks like me from sitting in my easy chair after setting my BLE-transmitting treadmill to 10 miles per hour. I find that my Wahoo Rival watch is by far the preferred method: no chest strap, no dropouts, and if one really wanted to prove one’s performance fidelity one could enable run cadence transmission as well.

This is WTRL Racing. This is where you go to sign up. If you navigate that site you’ll end up at the Zwift Duathlon League. This is separate from your basic Zwift account. You’ll need to establish a WTRL Profile. Then, you have to allow Zwift to share your data. You probably already do that. Your Zwift efforts are shared with STRAVA, or Training Peaks, are they not? You need to log into your Zwift account, migrate to Connections, and enable ZwiftPower to share your power data with WTRL. Yes, you’re enabling Zwift to share with Zwift, but that’s how the system works.

The result you get after finishing a Zwift Duathlon race is a point total and it works like this: You ride for distance, not for time. The ride is 35 minutes, and you’ll cover X number of miles during those 35 minutes. You get a point for every 100 meters you ride. You then get a point for every 20 meters you run. Total points wins. There are the typical age groups and it’s also gender-sorted. You can win the race; and you can win the series. The series consists of 4 races on consecutive Wednesdays. It’s by actual age. I’m lucky. The series commences on my 65th birthday, so I get to age up into the slow-peoples. (But somehow those older people aren’t ever as slow as I think they should be.)

Once you get your registration set up – and if you’re going to join me in the Zwift Duathlons I recommend you don’t wait until the day-of to do this – everything becomes pretty easy. You go to the WTRL Racing site, to sign up, and your entire profile auto-populates. You just have to select “Register”. Last year results were messy during that first season, but that's long since been cleaned up.

Now as to Club, if you want to be a part of the Slowtwitch club we’d be honored to have you. Once you start to type in Slowtwitch you may find more than one Slowtwitch club or team option, and that’s because Slowtwitch has a number of registered teams. For Zwift Duathlon, however, it’s just Slowtwitch. Choose that. You don’t have to actually be a member of the physical, outside-of-Zwift, real-world Slowtwitch Club (we don’t have one). If you’re part of another club you need to register your club as a club for the ZDL purpose.

You have a lot of time options. That’s one good thing about Zwift. You don’t have to wake up to race at 2am. As I am in the Pacific Time Zone I can race 9 times throughout the day, from midnight to 11pm. Everybody gets those same 9 options, so, if I race at 10am I’ll be racing British folk who’re on at 6pm and Kiwis who’re racing at 7am. Note that PST – the time in the U.S. West Coast – is the only time slot where all racing occurs on February 2nd. In all other time zones racing begins on the 2nd and eventually those time slots flow into the 3rd.

You must do the bike and run segments that belong to the same slot. The entire event for you, bike and run, need to be concluded in that 55-minute increment. If I were you I’d make sure my HR monitor was paired in both Zwift ride and run prior to event day. Pairing your device in Zwift is sticky. If you do it once, Zwift looks for that device again automatically. Still, make double-darned sure your HR broadcast is paired to Zwift for both the ride and run. The way it now is, you don’t need to log out of Zwift ride when an event terminates. But I believe you must log out of Zwift ride to log into Zwift run. You have 10 minutes to do all of that logging out and in and I’ve found that I don’t even need half that time.

Here are the full rules. Note that each event, the bike and the run, are available to be entered, but the full bike + run is what you’ll want to enter. That has its own discrete event ID.

When I raced last year more than 400 were in my race, several thousand took part when you add the races in all the time zones. I'm looking forward to it again. See you Wednesday!