ZWIFT Rides No Longer Count Towards Challenges?

This is simply outrageous and definitely not customer-oriented. Garmin, why won't you listen to what customers request?

It is indeed just insane that Zwift rides do not longer count towards challenges and intensity minutes. Especially the latter, since it renders my Garmin Forerunner 935 pretty much useless now. If this is not fixed, I'm likely moving away from Garmin. The irony is that I'm also using Tacx Neo 2T (Garmin recently bought Tacx), so I really just don't get WTF Garmin is doing. This is extremely frustrating.

Well, Intensity Minutes never worked on anything else than on Garmin watches, and they still do, even if you do your ride with Zwift. It is enough to wear the Forerunner, while you ride, or in case you use a chest belt HRM, connecting the HRM as an external sensor to the Forerunner (you can connect it to multiple devices).

And if you want the ride to count towards challenges, record the ride with your Forerunner. That's all what is needed.

I replied to this same message in the other thread.

trux said:

And if you want the ride to count towards challenges, record the ride with your Forerunner. That's all what is needed.

Also, to be clear, Forerunner 935 doesn't support HR broadcasting via Bluetooth (only via ANT+), so it's not compatible with Zwift for me and I have to use a chest strap HR sensor instead.

I then sync my Zwift activity to Garmin.

Now I wonder though what would happen if I record that same activity on the watch and ALSO sync it from Zwift?

I just didn't want to test that b/c I was afraid data from Garmin watch would override the data from Zwift (and the former would obviously be missing the distance and other data, so I don't want that - I need Zwift to be the "source of truth" there, not the other way around).

That being said, if anyone knows if it's possible to record the same activity on both Zwift and Garmin watch and somehow "merge" it together, I'd appreciate if you could provide any info on that.

You can use an ANT+ dongle to receive the heart rate. It works great with Zwift. I use that.

If you report both with 935 and Zwift you will get two activities. There is no merging or matching of activities.

There are software that can merge two activities. 

I've used this one: https://gotoes.org/strava/Combine_GPX_TCX_FIT_Files.php

I think this is a good tool, but I haven't bought it yet: https://www.fitfilerepairtool.info/

1. I'm using Zwift PC App on Linux via Lutris/Wine. So, I can't use neither Bluetooth nor ANT+ interfaces natively (neither is supported by Wine). Thus, I have to use Zwift Companion App to connect to my trainer and all the sensors.

2. I am not going to pay for a yet another software (not that I have time/desire to deal with merging the data) when all Garmin needs to do is to fix this issue. Maybe it's just time to switch to another fitness tracking solution (one that wouldn't require me to find workarounds, cause frustration, and waste my time; one that would "just work", like Garmin used to).

2. The only thing that doesn't work with Zwift is badges and challenge badges. If you go to an other fitness tracking solution you will not have any of these badges at all, so the question is how important are the badges?

Yeah, I agree on that. I mean, it'd be nice to have badges and I still find it ridiculous that Garmin only takes the data from the watch itself into account and ignores all other sources (there's really no excuse for that, IMO), but my primary issue is really the intensity minutes metric (see my message in the other thread - it's not exactly the same issue, but similar in that regard that Garmin ignores data coming from other sources, e.g. Zwift / external chest strap HR sensor, even though all the accurate data is really there). Without intensity minutes tracking, there isn't much value in using a fitness watch for me.

Kion said:

Also, to be clear, Forerunner 935 doesn't support HR broadcasting via Bluetooth (only via ANT+), so it's not compatible with Zwift for me and I have to use a chest strap HR sensor instead.

And where is the problem? Connect the chest strap as an external sensor to your Forerunner. You can connect an ANT+ HRM to up to ten devices simulatenously, so it can be connected in the same time to the Forerunner and to your Zwift device as well.

It means there is nothing that would prevent you from recording your Zwift ride with your Forerunner and hence having the acess to Garmin badges and challenges.