Zwift Academy Success Stories: Patrick Tan

As a busy professional, Patrick Tan sometimes lets his bike training slide. He’ll start riding less and not as hard, and it’s easy for him to become a “couch potato.”

Every year, that changes with Zwift Academy.

“It’s something I look forward to doing every year, because I know that’s the time when I get my lazy bones off the sofa and really do something to improve my form,” Tan says, laughing. “It’s like an insurance policy for me.”

Zwift Academy

is a community training program and talent search. To graduate Zwift Academy Road 2021, participating cyclists will complete 6 structured workouts and 2group rides within an 8-week timeframe. They’ll also do a baseline ride to see where they are at the start and a finish line ride to show how far they’ve come by the end. The annual road cycling academy is divided into a men’s side and a women’s side, and one rider from each gets to earn a pro contract.

Like most who participate, Tan isn’t going for the contract. He just likes the challenge, along with the community of riders who take it on together.

To learn more about Zwift Academy Road and to enroll, click here.

Disciplined Training

“You must have the discipline to see through the program,” Tan says. “It gives you added motivation to know that, ‘I want to do this. When I’m doing this, I want to outdo myself to be better and stronger.’”

Tan, who lives in Singapore, joined Zwift as a beta user in 2014. He signed up for the first men’s Zwift Academy in 2017. The Academy workouts were around 90 minutes long back then, and he wanted to see if he could get through them all, since his sessions were normally much shorter than that!

“I was quite delighted that I actually went through it and finished everything,” he says. “It became an annual highlight.”

The workouts have since shortened to about 60 minutes, but Tan still feels a sense of accomplishment from completing them. And they work – his legs feel sharper and his riding is better afterward.

The shorter format also makes it easier for him to create custom workouts and do them anytime. The lessons he’s learned from Zwift Academy help him to know how to make the best use of his time. He used to work long hours for a bank, and now he’s busy as a compliance director for a financial technology startup.

“As a time-crunched professional, sometimes I may want to do things that are specific to my own time limits,” says Tan. “I can customize the workouts that I do, like the ones in the Academy, to fit into my schedule.”

Patrick’s indoor setup

After giving his fitness a kick-start in the Academy, Tan usually does a few end-of-year races and sometimes some bike tours. He had been preparing for the Taiwan KOM challenge this October, but the COVID-19 pandemic kept him from entering, so he’s looking ahead to next year. If he loses fitness, he’ll know how to find it again!

Community Motivation

Tan has been cycling for more than 20 years, but he calls Zwift a “game-changing experience ever since I stepped on it.” It added another dimension to his riding, especially through social engagement.

“It’s a virtual environment, but behind each avatar is a real person,” Tan says. “I have the opportunity to engage with someone not from my country, not from my region, to share experiences and get to know the person who’s actually behind this character.”

Zwift Academy’s special ingredient is its community. Participants are encouraged to do workouts as a group, and they’re required to join social group rides or races in order to graduate. Tan is now an Academy ride leader, and he streams his rides with a live broadcast to help build that community and bring others in.

“It is really enriching and beneficial to me – in terms of my performance as a cyclist, and also as a person,” he says. “I get to interact with so many people around the world. We get to share our experiences, and we mutually benefit from one another by sharing training tips.”

This continues outside of the rides into the men’s and women’s Zwift Academy Facebook groups! People ask and answer questions, root each other on, and talk about each of the workouts as they complete them.

“Everyone’s doing the same thing,” says Tan. “You know that someone is also going through the same challenge as you.”

To new Academy riders, Tan says to be prepared to engage in the community and make friends. They’ll keep you motivated and inspired! He also encourages others to do what he did – try something that’s not normal for you, and become uncomfortable so that you can become better. It’s about improving yourself.

“No one’s really the ‘winner,’ other than the ones going for the pro contracts,” he says. “For the rest of us guys, when we cross the line, we cross the line together as a whole group.”