[caption id="attachment_97823" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] new v4.0.0 interface in Freeride (Japan)[/caption] MyWhoosh Review After 1,500km TL;DR - A Free version of zwift that's pretty good. More: Mywhoosh.com What is My Whoosh? MyWhoosh is a digital training and bike racing platform. As of March 2025, 85 routes are arranged into 12 worlds: Arabia, Columbia, Australia, Alula, Japan, Switzerland, Belgium, California and a few others. Belgium is the flattest, and Arabia has the most routes. The routes traverse deserts, canyons, towns, cities, mountains, and the Yas Marina F1 circuit. The most challenging but doable route is the Endurance Climb, which includes over 2500m of elevation gain and a 57km distance. You can chat or emote to other riders or do your own thing. As you try out new things and improve, you earn points, which you can use to upgrade your avatar's clothes or bike. Latest: March 2025 sees the release of V4, a significant update I'm working on updating into the content here. Look & Feel, General Experience My riding style was to complete as many different courses as possible, and I'm not far from achieving that. There are lots, and more are being added. I initially focused on climbs as I was testing out Wahoo KICKR CLIMB. I thought it was great and mostly used it in Free Ride mode to explore the numerous worlds and routes. I dabbled with a few manually created structured workouts, didn't enter any races, and tried a few group rides. Using a 2019 lowish-spec iMAC (Retina5K, 3.1Ghz 6-CORE i5), Mywhoosh worked OK even with maximum display settings. I had zero crashes and zero lost rides. Sometimes, a building might be rendered later than expected, but it feels natural enough. The main ride screen reminds me very much of Zwift. The secondary data overlays provide helpful information, and their transparency works well with the background. Rider information includes bots, real people, and their current watt output per kg, but their distances from you are incorrect. Plus, very many people seem to maintain over 4w/kg. Draw your conclusions! Drafting starts at 6m, and your wattage changes colour to green. Maintaining a draft distance was hard, but there was a definite drafting effect. At 30km/h, visual airflow effects appear at the end of your drops and increase in length the faster you go. Other People My Whoosh doesn't have the feeling of a social platform although as 2024 has progressed ino 2025 I've noticed a lot more users. I'm unsure how many are real users vs bots. Some of the supposedly real people keep appearing every time I ride but they could be real. In some worlds, there are few other riders. Most congregations of real people seemed to be on the more accessible, shorter, and flatter routes in the Belgian and Australian worlds. Contrast that to the challenging Endurance climb (above). In over two hours, I saw about ten people who all zoomed past me, cranking out over 4w/kg. When I summited, only four other people had completed it that day. I've only used MyWhoosh in the daytime (GMT), and I suspect the low number of riders I encountered is why some of the worlds are only open on certain days of the week: to concentrate people together and give the feel of more significant usage. Despite all this, I met someone on Mywhoosh I knew in real life! [caption id="attachment_97862" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] V4.0.0 Workout Interface[/caption] In-Game economy MyWhoosh uses three main in-game currencies: Coins – Earned through achievements (e.g., completing routes, maintaining speeds) and used to buy bikes, wheelsets, and gear. Gems – Earned through select achievements and challenges (e.g., "MyWhoosh 300") or purchased with real money and used to buy coins, exclusive in-game items, and a season pass. Season Points – Earned by participating in seasonal challenges and redeemed for rewards like coins, gems, and premium gear. Officially, this keeps riders engaged by offering multiple ways to earn and spend rewards. Unofficially, it confuses the heck out of people. Don't get currency confused with levels. You need Experience Points (XP), not currency, to level up. These seem to come from the distance you ride, which will likely be proportional to the time you spend riding. There might also be XP bonuses, which are mysteriously earned from unspecified performance milestones. Check how close you are to level up by looking at the current level in the top left corner. Once the yellow ring reaches the top, you level up (I think!). So, in the example below, I should be pretty close to levelling up to Level 30. Tip: Send Mywhoosh your Strava or Zwift stats and they will level you up and throw in a few other bonusses. I manged to get levelled up by 95 (ninety five) levels plus got numerous helmet and in-game currency [gallery columns="2" size="medium" ids="96991,97891"] Setup I had zero issues pairing with KICKR Move, Wahoo CLIMB, Wahoo HEADWIND, Assioma Duo, Polar SENSE and Garmin HRM-PRO Plus. A secondary power meter is used as a backup to validate power in races. I used 100% grade difficulty, which was challenging on a 28T gear on some of the steeper slopes. Some are in the high teens of percentages; some might be over 20% sometimes; I can't remember exactly. I also chose 1-second power updates rather than the default of 3-seconds. I didn't especially notice the difference, but the setting I made is probably much more helpful for races. The in-ride display is configurable. You can selectively hide each group of screen elements and change the camera angle. There is a smartphone partner app. I couldn't see how this could provide steering to My Whoosh when it runs on the MAC. (AFAIK: It can't). It should be able to change the virtual gearing added in March 2025. Exporting data from MyWhoosh isn't apparent (try here). I linked to strava, where the entire ride data later appears and then added 'export_csv' to the Strava URL to get a TCX workout file to use elsewhere. Hardware Performance As of March 2025, I've been using it on and off for 12 months, and it's never crashed. I have an Apple TV 4K, a high-spec Nvidia rtx3080 spec PC, and a TV capable of 120fps - but I initially only used MyWhoosh with a 2019 iMAC (Retina5K, 3.1Ghz 6-CORE i5). I get 30fps, which is not great, but it looks fine. A reasonable amount of detail is rendered; I only notice that new objects on the horizon tend to render blockily. Ok, I need to test my Whoosh with some of my good kit! The point I'm making here is that you don't need fancy kit to use myWhoosh; even an iPad should do it, though they vary considerably in their abilities, too. edit: Here are the test results on high-end kit, including an NVIDIA RTX 3080. MyWhoosh World Availability Schedule As of January 2025, Japan has been introduced as a season pass holder-only world (I've not yet subscribed). The other worlds are annoyingly available on a restrictive schedule. World Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Arabia ✔ ✔ ✔ Australia ✔ ✔ Colombia ✔ ✔ ✔ Belgium ✔ ✔ ✔ Alula ✔ ✔ ✔ Endurance Climb ✔ ✔ ✔ UCI ✔ ✔ ✔ Hudayriyat ✔ ✔ ✔ California ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ MyWhoosh World ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ Switzerland ✔ ✔ ✔ MyWhoosh with Apple TV 4K Gen 3 I'm currently testing myWhoosh with an Apple TV 4K streaming box, a nice piece of relatively powerful kit. Zwift, Peloton and MyWhoosh have tvOS apps. The good bits Overall, image quality and rendering speeds are much better than on my MAC #Shrug, The bad bits Navigating the MyWhoosh app on tvOS is awful. The Apple remote does not work in-app, so you must use an iPhone as a remote control. This DOES work, but the iPhone is a sensitive remote in my experience, and it is hard to correctly position the 'cursor' on the screen and very easy to miss-tap. (Edit: that's not entirely true. It's only true if you disable touch on the TV4K controller, with touch enabled the TV4K controller does work properly). The MyWhoosh app does not tell tvOS that it is active. Thus, the game will shut down and go into sleep mode once you reach the end of the TV 4K's sleep period setting. Although you will not lose your ride when this happens, you can't resume where you left off. Grrr. After that once happened, I changed my sleep period to something like 2 hours in tvOS. I only get 30fps (same as the MAC). TV 4K supports at least 60fps (90fps?), so the limitation in gameplay must also apply to the old TV I'm using (I'll test with the 120fps one soon). MyWhoosh with Mac Mini (2024 model) Currently testing. Garage & Points System You go to the garage to change bikes, wheels and apparel. You buy them with coins earned from various in-ride achievements, ranging from giving 500 thumbs up to completing a course to cranking out 8w/kg or averaging 35km/h for an hour. Points also accrue for each new route completed, but you don't level up after each of them, and I didn't quite figure out exactly why or how I levelled up. You also get credits and experience points for minutes or miles ridden, perhaps for climbs and sprints completed. After about 500km, I had enough coins to buy a TT bike and a decent set of wheels, totalling just under 100,000 credits. I purchased the disc wheel before realising one came 'free' with the TT bike. #Sigh. Since I wrote this, the points aspects have been revamped. There now seem to be three-point schemes, including 'gems, ' which is confusing. Plus, you can optionally buy kit and gear. One of the points systems appears to be seasonal, which I thought was a good idea to encourage you to keep returning and earning! Unlocking a New World The strategy seems to be that a new WORLD is released each season. Once the season is finished, anyone can access it; during the season, you need a season pass to access the new world. This link details how to do that - it's not obvious. https://the5krunner.com/2025/02/01/how-to-unlock-japan-world-in-mywhoosh-hint-gems/ Structured Workouts The workout creator is OK but limited, so I imported my workouts from my TrainingPeaks library. That link does work, but sometimes it doesn't! I had to disconnect and reconnect my TP account to force the workouts to sync to my MyWhoosh calendar. The workout mode itself is pretty good. You can see in the following image that each segment step is detailed to the left,t with an overview of progress over the entire workout to the bottom. I'm not sure why the map appears in workout mode either, but it's there! Virtual Gearing Virtual gearing is added in v4. You can see it in the previous image. Gear can be changed with the MyWhoosh link app or on-screen (bottom right corner). I've not used these yet and would prefer to disable them, Apparently Zwift Cog hardware is not supported. Bugs/annoyances Very occasionally, I start to pedal, but the avatar won't move for a few seconds. This could be Wifi interference or be linked to the KICKR's BLE transmission in some mysterious way. With a Kickr Direct Connect cable, the lag is one second. The distance shown to other riders is wrong. What is shown is the as-the-crow-flies distance, not the on-the-road distance. Hence, it's useless unless you are on the same straight stretch of road as someone. In fact, it's so useless as the other person could be tens of road kilometres away on some of the windy circuits. Segments/sprints don't always work correctly, but only in trivial ways. For example, once, one segment did not complete until my second lap. I did a fast segment time on another occasion, but it didn't appear on the leaderboard immediately when it should have. Upcoming segments can be shown when they are after a junction but not on the route you have chosen to follow. As at January 2025, these seem improved. I can't give a thumbs up on a MAC, as it's not within arm's distance. I want to do that physically on a companion smartphone app on my bike that also executes U-turns and left/right turns at junctions. All bikes seem to have the same aero rating...even the TT bike I saved up for (now fixed). Bike weights are shown as different, though I don't know if this is reflected in the gameplay. Other than aesthetics, there seems to be little point in changing from the default bike. The elevation profile is helpful, but I'd also like to know the number of metres left on the current climb and left on the current lap. You might have issues installing on Windows 11 (I did) unless you install the optional Windows component DirectX. A final thing that still doesn't quite sit right with me is which stats are in different places on the screen. For example, why isn't my speed next to or underneath my power? my Whoosh v5.0.0 As of 12 May 2025 v5 was released. (today!. I can't see any differences, even though it is hyped as a significant upgrade. Perhaps the newness will be unlocked soon. Version 4.0 has some quite major changes to the interface. See the earlier images for the workout and free-ride interfaces. Thoughts Considering it's a freebie, I'm at a loss as to why more people don't use it. I like it. It's a good training platform, and the company hasn't paid me to say that or incentivised me in any other way. The company couldn't even give me a free subscription as it's free to everyone! I only considered using MyWhoosh because the platform shares the same PR company as Wahoo, so it contacted me to point out the new virtual running feature. I just thought I'd try to test out some other Wahoo stuff. Then, I ended up staying in the ecosystem. MyWhoosh is starting to market its product more, but it needs to raise awareness significantly. If it stays free (it won't), it will eventually entice many people from Zwift. But I'd expect it to start charging at some point. I can't see that point being anytime soon, though. The owner is a benevolent benefactor with deep pockets who loves cycling! Hmmm. He's also based in the UAE, and perhaps this venture is another of the region's efforts to turn their hard-earned petrodollars into long-term leisure incomes....think golf, boxing, F1, football, holidays and duty-free shopping. MyWhoosh also sponsors and hosts UCI racing and seems to be moving towards Supertri. That must reassure those who tried the platform a couple of years ago that it's now stable (it is). One of the barriers to switching to Zwift must be the amount of effort Zwifters have put into levelling up, which must create a reluctance to leave. Perhaps MyWhoosh could think of a clever way to offer an equivalent incentive to someone who switches to represent their previous commitment to virtual cycling, e.g., level 40 on Zwift might give you level 30 on myWhoosh and one million points. However, MyWhoosh has a tricky job attracting Zwift's racers who want the competitive element of virtual cycling, unlike me, who just pottered around in various virtual worlds for a few days. For casual users, it will be easier and for casual groups of friends, it should also be more straightforward. More: Commenters below and elsewhere seem obsessed with the ownership of MyWhoosh. Perhaps rightly, IDK. Here is some more info on that. Mywhoosh, employees on LinkedIn CEO: Akhtar Saeed Hashmi (on Crunchbase, in Royal Technology Solutions and in the company's hierarchy and individually) Venture capitalists True Ventures, Highland Europe, and Causeway Media Partners fund Zwift. Someone might find a questionable investment of theirs, IDK. Your average large Venture Capitalist isn't ordinarily renowned for their social responsibility, but maybe those three are. IDK USA vs UAE and human rights: both countries still have the death penalty. And the USA hasn't signed up for the UN Convention on Human Rights. I'd rather live in America. Interpret the facts as you wish! Further reading: Wahoo s Latest Interface Upgrade Enhances Cycling Experie….
