Outside Magazine

In November, Tim “Bacon” Searle, an amateur cyclist based in New South Wales, Australia, reached a considerable milestone: he became the first person to ride more than 100,000 kilometers (62,000 miles) using Zwift, the online cycling platform. That’s one and a half times around the earth, without ever leaving his home, since October 2015, when he was laid up after a bad crash. Searle now rides on Zwift so much—around 24 hours a week, often early in the morning—that he sometimes falls asleep on the trainer. “I’ve never actually fallen off,” he wrote to me recently in an e-mail, “but I’ve banged my nose on the handlebars pretty badly.”

Zwift is now in its fifth year, and it’s fair to say that things are going pretty well. To date, 1.1 million people have registered for a $15-per-month account, and cyclists like Searle have clocked a total of more than 200 million miles. 

It would be hard to overstate Zwift’s impact on cycling. Part social-media platform, part personal trainer, part computer game, Zwift is beloved by recreational riders, who tout its convenience, safety, and community aspects, as well as pros, who have reaped huge benefits using the platform for hard training and injury rehab. In February 2016, just six weeks before the prestigious Paris-Roubaix race, Orica-GreenEdge rider Mathew Hayman crashed and broke his arm. His doctor told him he was done for the season. After 20 hours of spinning a week on Zwift, however, Hayman was fit enough to win the race that April, a peak career achievement.