Road to Ruins used to be one of my favourite routes, decent warm up, a mixture of fairly punchy/testing climbs, depending on how hard you push obviously. Then a decent warm down running back to the beach.
But since the change of surface it just feels like a drag, and as I use Strava to monitor performance/progress over time it has basically blown this area for me as I can’t get near my old times.
For example, on the Jungle Outward Climb segment, which is basically from somewhere near the start/finish banner on the jungle loop to the start of the rope bridge, today my time was 7:42 averaging 371W & 150bpm. My best time (29th Nov 2018) is 5:36 averaging 374W & 151bpm. So a difference of 2 minutes for almost identical effort.
Is there any chance that this surface issue could ever revert? I must admit that I don’t really see the benefit of introducing gravel bikes/surfaces to users, I can only guess that their was some corporate sponsorship involved from bike manufacturers. And surely Zwift should have just introduced some new gravel trails for this purpose, rather than ruining one of the existing routes.