Zwift Run Pod Review

Most of us know Zwift as the indoor cycling giant which has changed the face of indoor cycling from pedaling aimlessly on the trainer to now professionals racing across the world during lockdown. Over the past few years they have also quietly been helping runners as well. As you know, I don’t subscribe to Zwift, but for indoor running you don’t need to either. Running around in Watopia is totally free (for now, as they are in beta version). To curb my enthusiasm for indoor running I made the purchase to buy the little pod that makes all the magic happen.

I’ve looked around for this during the start of lockdown but it was sold out everywhere or was harder to find up here in Canada during my previous attempts. The idea is pretty simple, strap on the Bluetooth pod to your shoe to track speed and cadence and it sends that data to your ipad or phone. It was simple to set-up and does the job quite well. Since I live in the Garmin eco-system and everything runs on ant+ and my Garmin run dynamics pod doesn’t gather speed data (it uses the watch GPS), I needed to purchase this little device for indoor running.

INITIAL IMPRESSIONS

The pod itself is pretty basic. It’s about the size of a quarter but quite thick. It weighs about 75 grams and attached quite easily to your shoelaces with a part that goes under while the pod goes on top. The only thing you need to make sure is the grooved part of the pod is on bottom and the pod needs to “click” into place when you turn it to attach the two pieces.

VERDICT

I’ve only run a handful of times using the pod, but so far my experience has been great. Between running around the virtual world and listening to my podcasts, indoor treadmill running hasn’t been so dreaded so far, which is a good thing as we head further into the winter. I will look into the run plans offered in Zwift to see how they go. Only thing I wished Zwift would do for running would be to create maybe a separate world or course for runners. As of now, running takes place on the same streets as cycling and my only gripe with that is runners don’t move as fast as cyclists, therefore on my runs it seems pretty bare and boring not seeing anyone (however cyclists zoom by for about a second or so). Would be nice to have more runners around like cyclists do. When you enter Zwift, it shows how many runners are on, but since the cycling world is so large and spread out when you're running, seeing another runner is few and far between (from what I have noticed so far). I will try to spend some more time playing around on the app over the next few months and give my final review at a later date.