If it’s that big of an issue for you, you can buy small canisters of medically pure oxygen on Amazon. They’re not very expensive. The oxygen generator/concentrator machines are a bit more spendy.

They did not.

I’ve never talked to Zwift internally about it, but my immediate thought would be that it would be too easy to game any altitude compensation. If the game gave you an extra 5% based on location, people would start using VPNs based on Colorado, right? 😜

I’ve done multiple multi-month hops between the Bay Area and Colorado in the past few years. In 2021, I spent 2 months in Mountain View as COVID restrictions lifted and I was required to head back into the office, and in 2022 I spent a full month in South San Francisco for onboarding. As a result, I’ve been able to observe the effects of altitude over multiple acclimation cycles. Going up to 5000 ft costs me, personally, 7 to 8% power after acclimating (the rule of thumb is 1% per 1000 ft or 5%, but everyone is different). To put this in perspective, I was fairly easily able to tap out 360 W for 20 min at sea level in 2021 right before heading back up to altitude, but never got better than 335 W at altitude during that year.

It makes racing really hard and demoralizing to know that 85 to 90% of rides are oxygen doping (compared to what I’m breathing). I would really like a power buff or drag reduction to compensate for where I live.

But they were animators right? Not MIT Graduate Meteorologists called ‘Director of content programming’ or something meaningless.

It’s stunningly bad and puzzling in equal measure when you see who zwift hire.

And, of course, real world performance of bikes is kind of meaningless. Firstly you’d need to have real world physics for it to work in the game and secondly, if some bikes are quicker than others in a game then everyone will just want to ride the fastest one – and anything you do to prevent them from doing that (making them ride miles or whatever) will just make them think the game sucks.

A complete waste of time and money that no doubt they all enjoyed.

Fixed!

That old caption was for the old photo, which Specialized had me remove… 🙂

Yes, now I look double-silly 🙂

Looks like it was corrected!