Virtual Vision: North grad finishes fifth in eSports Women’s World Championship

Last weekend, Liz Van Houweling cycled 33 1/2 miles around Central Park and other parts of New York City, and she did it from the basement of her home near Des Moines, Iowa.

The ride was far from a leisurely jaunt for the 2008 Columbus North graduate, however. Van Houweling was among 87 competitors in the in the virtual UCI eSports Women’s World Championship, and she came away with a fifth-place finish.

“It’s been a thing for awhile,” Van Houweling said. “A lot more people got involved once COVID hit because all the real races got canceled. So it became a lot bigger deal in the past two years for sure.”

In e-cycling, riders remove their rear wheel and attach the bikes to a trainer. For the World Championship, all the riders were sent the same equipment and biked the same course with the same hills against each other.

Using the Zwift platform, competitors could track where they were in the race, compared to other riders, on a video screen.

“It’s kind of like a video game for bikes,” Van Houewling said. “You’re pedaling and everything, and you can push buttons and become more aerodynamic. It still has the principles of drafting and everything. You’re still interacting with everyone around you. We are still riding together and affecting what other people do.”

The former Liz Martin was a cross-country, gymnastics and track athlete at North and joined the cycling club when she got to college at Northern Colorado. She was a two-time national qualifier in road cycling, a one-time national qualifier in track cycling and a two-time Rocky Mountain Collegiate Cycling Conference Division II overall points winner.

“My family always rode recreationally growing up, and my sister rode at Purdue,” Van Houweling said. “It seemed like less of a time commitment than some other sports.”

After graduating with a degree in exercise science in 2012, Van Houweling returned to Indiana and worked at a bike shop in Indianapolis. She spent a year training, racing and doing an internship as a cycling coach in Tuscon, Arizona, before moving to Iowa and getting married.

Van Houweling has two kids and took about five years off from cycling. She started e-cycling about a year ago.

“I had kids, and after I had kids, I dedicated myself to getting fit again,” Van Houweling said. “With COVID, more and more people were talking about it, and I had been into bikes in general for a long time. It seemed like a realistic option and way to do it.”

So Van Houweling got on Zwift and joined a team out of the United Kingdom called ProVision that raced during her son’s nap time.

“When I first joined, I raced a lot with the men, and that helped me out a lot,” Van Houweling said. “I learned how to draft efficiently. I worked on my weaknesses and really prepared myself for specific effort levels. It’s lots of intensity and not a ton of volume. A lot of intense hard riding got me really fit.”

Last fall, Van Houweling found out about a qualifier for the World Championship a month ahead of time and began training for it virtually. When she made it, she began training virtually on the New York course for the World Championship.

The World Championship race took Van Houweling about an hour and 20 minutes to complete, and that is in the ballpark of the length her training rides go these days.

Van Houweling, 31, works as a cycling coach and personal trainer in the Des Moines area. She puts on clinics and goes to people’s houses and does in-home training.

“I think the (virtual) racing does suit me a little bit better,” Van Houweling said. “It’s shorter. It’s convenient for training purposes with kids to get fit in your basement. It’s cheaper, and you don’t have to travel. My kids are 2 and 4, so I don’t see it getting any less hectic. I love racing in real life, but at this stage in my life, I don’t see it being realistic from a time perspective.”