Bonking is a dreaded experience, an exhaustion of fuel and shutdown of the body’s ability to exert itself. The term gets thrown around a lot, but if you’ve ever felt it you know how bad it can be, and...

Last year, TrainerRoad launched its integration with Zwift, and that’s how I’ve been doing all of my indoor structured cycling workouts ever since. As I wrote at the time, TrainerRoad has been my favorite training app since I got into cycling and triathlons—I love its data-science-based approach to training plans, and I’m still seeing improvements after all these years. Executing the workouts in Zwift made it even better for me; Zwift’s visual engagement and gamification made my workouts more enjoyable than just staring at a graph, and as a result my training plan compliance improved. That said, I’ve been curious about Rouvy for a while. Last year, Rouvy acquired FulGaz and took over as the “Official Digital Sports Platform” for the Ironman and Ironman 70.3 series. The announcement promised access to numerous Ironman and Ironman 70.3 courses on Rouvy, to “help riders build muscle memory of routes in advance to give them a vital race-day edge.” The missing piece was being able to bring my TrainerRoad workouts to Rouvy; the idea of being able to preview the courses for my races _while_ getting the workouts in my training plan done seemed very compelling. So, when I got invited to beta-test TrainerRoad’s integration with Rouvy a couple of weeks ago, I jumped at the chance, even though I had never used Rouvy. I’ve done over a dozen TrainerRoad workouts on Rouvy so far, and now that Rouvy 4.7 is live, here are my impressions of the integration, and of Rouvy itself. * * * Just to get it out of the way: The integration with TrainerRoad works great. I have zero complaints about it. Here’s how it works: Every morning, TrainerRoad sends the scheduled workout for the day to Rouvy, and it shows up on Rouvy’s home screen and in the workouts section. If you’re not on a training plan, TrainerRoad pushes a recommended workout for the day, as suggested by its TrainNow feature, which uses machine learning to recommend workouts based on your recent training history. You can also manually schedule workouts in TrainerRoad’s calendar, or replace existing ones with alternates, and the changes are reflected almost instantly in Rouvy. It all works seamlessly—you don’t even need to restart the Rouvy app; the changes show up in real time. For example, today my plan has scheduled “Woolwell,” a fun two-hour VO2 max workout. Note how “Woolwell” is synced with both Rouvy and Zwift. It’s good to have options, I suppose. I can select it in Rouvy, pick a route, and off I go. If I’m gonna suffer through almost thirty minutes of VO2 max, at least I’m gonna do it in Kona. Executing the workout works exactly as you’d expect, if you’re used to doing structured workouts in TrainerRoad or Zwift: You’ll see a list of upcoming intervals in the top-left corner of the screen, a number of metrics in the bottom-left corner, a diagram of the workout’s structure overlaid with a power (and optionally, heart rate) graph, and some on-screen controls to pause the workout, toggle erg mode on and off, adjust the target power, and skip the current interval (although unfortunately you can’t go back to a previous interval). I love how customizable the UI is; you can make everything bigger and easier to read, or smaller so it’s out of the way, and you can change all of the metrics in the HUD in the corner. The controls are remappable as well—if you’re using a controller such as the Zwift Click, you can change what each button does. For example, I set the Z button on mine to toggle erg mode on and off, which can be very useful when doing all-out sprints and VO2 max intervals. Zwift, take note. Someday I will ride the Queen K for real, but for now this will have to do. Once the workout is done, you’ll be presented with a post-workout survey to record your RPE on a scale of 1–10. This gets sent back to TrainerRoad and converted into its 1–5 scale, although you can always update the rating in TrainerRoad afterward—the rating you select, along with your actual performance during the workout, helps TrainerRoad’s machine-learning system determine future adaptations to the training plan and estimate FTP changes. You also get a nice, detailed overview of the workout, which you can review while the completed workout gets synced back to TrainerRoad and any other services you have connected, such as Strava or Garmin Connect. Doing my TrainerRoad workouts in the Rouvy iPad app has worked flawlessly in my testing, with no connection dropouts or app crashes. Erg mode works reasonably well with my Wahoo Kickr Move; I haven’t seen any major issues with power accuracy. All of the intervals in the workouts I’ve done have been on target, or at worst off by a watt or two. The videos are surprisingly immersive—I was skeptical of how good the avatar would look overlaid on top of a video, but it looks much better in motion than you’d think from looking at screenshots; even the shadows of the avatar are matched to the lighting source in the video. The effect is convincing enough that I’ve gotten a few jump scares from cars in the video close-passing my avatar—maybe a little too realistic for my taste. Rouvy 4.7 also introduces “enhanced videos” that are sharper, smoother, and don’t have ghosting or the weird interpolation artifacts that occur when the avatar is going slowly and the video slows down accordingly. I honestly find the experience of riding in Rouvy more engaging that Zwift’s cartoon graphics. Somewhere on the Ironman 70.3 Versailles course, one of the new “enhanced” video courses. What makes Rouvy truly stand out, however, is the vast library of courses—there are _hundreds_ to choose from. I’ve mostly done the Ironman ones during my workouts, because that’s what I’m most interested in, and they’re fantastic. Thanks to Rouvy’s partnership with Ironman, most of the newest routes are recorded _on race day_ , with their content-creation team out on the bike course early on race morning. This means you can preview things like road and lane closures, lane changes, traffic management, distance markers, and even the location of the aid stations and penalty tents. Ironman Copenhagen is definitely on my bucket list now. This makes Rouvy an invaluable tool for race prep and course recon, plus it’s very cool to get a taste of races I might never be able to do otherwise. It’s giving me severe wanderlust—I want to do every race now. * * * So far, so good, right? The TrainerRoad integration works great, doing the workouts is great, the routes are great. What’s not to like? Unfortunately, it’s what happens _after_ the workouts that ruins my experience with Rouvy. For starters, the ride ends immediately after you complete the workout—you cannot keep riding afterward. Are you close to finishing the route? Are you 10 XP away from leveling up? Do you simply want to cool down a little longer? Tough luck, ride’s over, you’re _done_. Oh, were you hoping to keep riding through Snow Canyon after this workout? Too bad! I haven’t been able to finish most of the routes I’ve done for this exact reason. I would brush this off as just a minor annoyance, except that _you also can’t continue workout routes where you left off_. You see, in Rouvy, when you finish a free ride without completing the route, that unfinished route gets added to the “continue riding” collection, so you can restart it later on from where you left off. Free rides also have a “teleport” function, so you can move your avatar wherever you want on the route. Neither of these options is available during workouts: You can’t teleport around the route during a workout, and if your workout ends before the end of the route, ending your ride along with it, the route doesn’t get added to the “continue riding” collection—you’ll have to start from the beginning next time. If I want to ride an entire race course, I could: 1. Do it as free rides, so I can continue where I left off or teleport around. I’d have to do this instead of my scheduled structured workouts (which means deviating from my training plan) or in addition to them (which would impact my training load and recovery). 2. Swap my scheduled workout for a much longer one to ensure I can cover the entire course. A three-hour workout could cover a 70.3 course, but to complete a full Ironman course I’d have to do at least a six-hour workout, indoors, in one shot. Who wants to do that? I’d rather do my long rides outside. In other words, _Rouvy’s product design forces me to choose between following my training plan and using Rouvy as a course recon tool_. For me, that’s a no-brainer. Following my training plan as prescribed has a much bigger impact on my race results than being able to preview the course, so I’ll choose that every time, but it’s frustrating that I can’t easily do both. For someone like me, who primarily does structured workouts as part of a training plan with specific goals, this one product design decision significantly reduces the appeal of the platform—it effectively kills my use case of using Rouvy to recon Ironman race courses during my workouts. It’s a real shame, and I’d love to see Rouvy change the way workouts work to match the functionality of free rides—it would make Rouvy the perfect platform to train for Ironman races. *[UI]: User Interface *[HUD]: Heads-Up Display *[RPE]: Rating of Perceived Exertion *[FTP]: Functional Threshold Power *[XP]: Experience Points

TrainerRoad is a cycling training plan focused software platform built around structured workouts, and it’s refreshingly straightforward to use. You can commit to a full plan or opt for the more…

TrainerRoad is a cycling training plan focused software platform built around structured workouts, and it’s refreshingly straightforward to use. You can commit to a full plan or opt for the more flexible TrainNow feature, which suggests sessions based on your recent activity. In practice, a TrainerRoad subscription has proven effective, delivering consistent indoor training and ... Read more

#Rollentrainer Ratgeber für Rennrad: Was ist das, wie lange trainieren und was beachten?

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