So here is attempt at a poll to see which real world courses would be most popular on zwift.
Just use the +1 promote button on the LHS to show your support!
Ride on!
Alpe D’huez
Tour of Flanders / Ronde Van Vlaanderen
The Stelvio for the climbers
Or the Madonna Di Ghisallo
The last thing I would want to do on a trainer is a long grind of a climb so for me it would be more like the classics courses with a few short but sharp climbs along with rolling terrain.
How about some of the Tour of California stages…or some of the classic California climbs?
May not be the best course to add second, but once a half-dozen courses get uploaded it would be awesome to be able to ride a popular Ironman bike course, e.g. Kona, Lake Placid, Coeur d’Alene, Tahoe, etc.
Various Ironman 70.3 & Full courses
Kings Ridge, Sonoma California. Climbs, sweeping descents, views of the pacific ocean. Not a lot unlike Wattopia, but more based on reality.
The Fred.
The ironman courses would be great. I vote for a variety of courses so that if one needs an easy day, a flat course would be available. A long varied course would be fine if you could choose to start anywhere along the course.
The ironman courses would be great. I vote for a variety of courses so that if one needs an easy day, a flat course would be available. A long varied course would be fine if you could choose to start anywhere along the course.
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I would like to see some crit rides, something short and fast. We would need to limit riders or reserve a spot, something like the Tacx TTS
Ironman or half IM courses would be great
Ironman or half IM courses would be great
I’ve worked out on a bunch of trainers and the most compelling VR world so far has been the Expresso. Check out what they did for some ideas. Don’t feel compelled to reproduce real-world rides only. I really like the Mayan Temple rides, and for the real bikers we all competed on the Abominable Snowman ride (can’t remember real name). Ultimately their hardware killed the system, thought they still exist, but most gyms don’t want to bother because of cost and hardware problems. But they got most of the software right.
And as other people have mentioned, the heart of it was two features: riding against your previous ‘ghost’ and the leaderboards. You need both of those.
I can certainly recommend fun places to match rides with, (main one I’d recommend for now is near you, Stanford to up Page Mill, Skyline to Crazy Petes or something like that, maybe 84 to ocean and back a different route over Skyline, something like that is a must, and has been mentioned as they do that in Tour of Ca) but my main point here is to do rides that are impossible. I don’t know, maybe up the side of a volcano that is going off moderately, follow the Collosus ride at Magic Mountain or make up your own bike/amusement park ride, something in space around a space station with a nebula nearby, etc. You get the idea.
Those of us with expensive power-controllable-trainers that can do 18% want to see crazy rides with the steepest ups and downs to make it fun.
And space is always good in any context.
Okay, if I had to recommend one single ride to focus on involving Skyline in the Palo Alto area, and as mich as I like Page Mill, it would be this:
Lake Lag at Stanford (or start at the end of SLAC for more techno-cred?) to Sand Hill to Portola to Old La Honda to Skyline. Eat a powerbar at Alice’s. La Honda to the Ocean and then Hwy 1 up to Tunitas Creek and Kings Mountain. Then 84 to Alamedas Las Pulgas to Lake Lag. Some variant of this is *the* ride of the area.
A few variants, start at the end of SLAC and then on the way home in Woodside you just take Wiskey Hill Road to the Sand Hill/Slac junction. Note in real life the longer warmup was often appreciated when starting from near Lake Lag, and since we were students then we had to start from campus somewhere.
The other part people will argue about is once you are on Skyline you can continue down Old La Honda to La Honda for a bit over the top. That is fine either way, Old La Honda is more technical and slower, and La Honda has more cars (in real life) and is much faster. Since we aren’t on a TacX which would speed up the rear wheel, perhaps the more technical one is better :). It is great either way.
I mocked this up here:
http://ridewithgps.com/routes/9931676
4678 ft and 46 miles
The easier classic ride is up Page Mill (start at PageMill and Foothill, or Lake Lag again), over Skyline North to something like Crazy Petes or Kings Mountain down the mountain and back. That is half the ride going all the way to the ocean is and is often used as prep for the whole enchillada.
There is also simply going down Skyline itself, which is quite something.
This is Skyline from 92 to 17 with the initial climb to Skyline. Absolutely incredible - wild ride with few that can compare in the US in terms of Redwood Forests and all that. One fun way to do this would be to design it up as it would have looked in the 1880s, with Bears and crusty old gold miner types and loggers and whatever.
http://ridewithgps.com/routes/9931783
5283 ft and 41 miles
Mont Ventoux