It would be nice to have a mountain route without the radio tower to be able to do a two lap race under 90 minutes. The current mountain courses are inconvenient because one lap is too short and two laps are too long to fit into a 70-90 minute time frame.
Great idea! Definitely fills a void and would add another exciting challenge for riders.
As a big fan of climbs (or is that a “fan of big climbs”?), I second this. Adding the tower climb to the loop strings everyone out a bit too much and adds too much time to the race/event.
Something like:
- Mountain 8 - Short (Mountain 8 minus Tower)
- Mountain 8 - Full (Mountain 8 + Tower)
@Steve B. Can we get this in the pipeline?
Instead of creating a new route, I have what I think could be a simpler approach. How about a mode where the ride leader can make turns and everyone in the group is assigned the same direction? In this way you could select the mountain route and then select the straight option as the ride leader and avoid the high tower. This would ultimately be more flexible for other scenarios like this.
@Duane, I don’t think that’ll work either. I was riding hard up Mountain 8 the other night, put my head down and just started hammering, then looked up and I was half-way up the radio tower, and missed my PR at the banner finish at the top of the lap, so had to turn around and come back down.
If the ride leader happens to look away for a few moments, he might miss that turn and everyone will end up going the wrong way following him.
Making it a hard-defined as a route would avoid this. Or, if the leader is lagged, or behind the front of the pack, or drops out for some reason.
I see what you mean, David. It isn’t foolproof of course but adding a collection of various routes by name invites another kind of confusion. The ultimate solution is probably the ability for the ride leader to define an arbitrary route in advance. A pie-in-the-sky secondary feature might be for ride participants to get a quick fly by view of the expected route or perhaps a summary of total elevation change. I’m just suspicious that adding routes by name is a band aid solution that won’t scale as Watopia continues to expand.