MyWhoosh: Free Virtual Racing with Real Prize Money

Winter in South Australia is when my training either holds together or falls apart. Track sessions at the velodrome, long endurance rides, the odd 100km road race prep block — and when the weather turns or I can't get to the track, the trainer takes over. For a while now that's meant Zwift, and for a lot of riders it still will. But lately I've been doing a fair bit of my indoor riding on MyWhoosh, and three things about it genuinely surprised me: it's free, there's prize money in its events, and to my eyes it looks and feels more like a real road than anything else I've ridden indoors.

No subscription. None at all.

The first thing to understand about MyWhoosh is the part that sounds too good to be true: it's free. There's no monthly subscription gating the group rides or the events, the way Zwift keeps its best content behind a paywall. You download the app, log in, and ride.

And if you're not a smart-trainer household — which I often am not — there's a free ride mode that works with a traditional trainer and a speed sensor. A speed-to-power algorithm moves your avatar through the worlds based on how fast you're actually turning the pedals, so you don't need to buy new kit just to get in the door.

It looks like riding, not a video game

I'll be honest: I've always found Zwift's cartoon look fun, but it's never felt like riding. MyWhoosh goes the other direction. The worlds are built around real roads and real scenery, you can ride them in day or night mode (auto follows your time zone), and the gradients and physics feel closer to actually climbing a hill than the flat, gamey feel of most indoor platforms.

For me that matters on the long endurance rides. Three hours into a base block, a world that looks like a real road — with the light changing as the ride goes on — keeps my head in the ride better than a cartoon one does.

There's also proper gear-shifting mechanics: MyShift gives you 30 virtual gears that you can change via the Link app or in-game controls, so you can actually hold your cadence up a climb instead of just staring at a power number.

Real prize money on the line

Here's where it stops being just a training tool. MyWhoosh runs the Sunday Race Club (SRC) — weekly races every Sunday across categories 1 to 6, with the last Sunday of the month as the finals. It's open to riders of all levels, and recent men's finals have carried nearly US$100,000 in prize money, paid out to the top 10 in each category, plus team prizes at the finals and sprint and KOM awards along the way.

That's a different level of stakes than "beat your mate's time". You register for a week's race from Monday 11am GMT through Thursday 3am GMT, get matched into your category, and ride for real money. One honest caveat: to be eligible for SRC you need a verified power passport test on approved equipment, so there is a bit of admin before your first race. On the plus side, there's a six-week SRC beginner training plan in the app (Training Plans > Beginner) that walks you up to it step by step.

Where I've been riding

I've been logging my rides and results in the MyWhoosh ecosystem, and if you want to see what an average athlete is actually doing in these events — my categories, my results, my best efforts — my rider page on MyWhooshInfo has it all: Luke Keam's MyWhooshInfo rider page.

The rest of the toolkit

A few things I've come to rely on:

• Custom workout creator — build, import and manage workouts on the website; they drop straight into your in-game custom folder and can be exported for other platforms.
• Day/night mode — day, night or auto based on your time zone.
• Rowing mode — indoor rowing with performance tracking in the same app, handy when I want to keep the aerobic work going without a bike under my feet.
• Triathlon mode — seamless bike/run transitions with a dual-login system, originally built for SuperTri events.

The bottom line

If you're an amateur racer using Zwift because it's the default indoor option, give MyWhoosh a weekend. It costs nothing to start, it doesn't need a smart trainer to get you riding, and when you're ready to race there's actual prize money on the line in events open to riders of all abilities. For an average athlete trying to keep training sharp without the budget matching the ambition, that's a hard combination to argue with.

You can download MyWhoosh from mywhoosh.com.