VR Cinglé du Mont Ventoux

During the Covid-19 UK lockdown I’ve been catching up on writing up some of those rides that I’ve had in draft for a while, and I recently published the 2016 ride I did up Mont Ventoux – the Cinglé du Mont Ventoux. So it was co-incidence when 3 days after I write up that ride, I see a post from the Cinglés club on Strava, proposing the challenge of the Cinglés in Virtual Reality.

Being someone who is quite used to spending time on the turbo trainer (and enjoying it) this was something I was for sure going to have a dig at, and this being a French challenge, there would be some application to understand.

So, reading the post I had to register for the challenge on the club website inscriptions page – just like you have to when applying in real life, then I could get on with the challenge at any time. Tech wise though the challenge had to be attempted on a training platform called Rouvy and being a Zwifter, I had never bothered with it before so I had to get that sorted first.

Over to the internet search – So, Rouvy is an indoor cycling app which combines GPS videos with animated 3D cyclists to ‘recreate’ the outdoor environment, and I needed to register with Rouvy and bang in all my details; personal info, weights powers etc. Then I had to download the Rouvy AR App onto the iPad, this is what would be controlling the load on my smart trainer during the attempt, and this would also provide the visuals I’d be looking at.

The GPS videos/Augmented Reality (AR) is only available on a handful of the routes that Rouvy holds, the rest of the routes are formatted so that the rider is represented as a moving pin which follows a 3d mapped road of the selected route. The mapped road has a gradient of colours along it indicating the steepness of the ascent.

Now that I had a Rouvy account set up I could access all of the premium features for a 2 week trial period, this meant I could access the augmented reality routes as well as their standard routes – I’d need both kinds for the challenge as the Club had mandated specifically which routes you had to undertake on Rouvy to ride the challenge.

• Mt. Ventoux (from Bedoin) 17 km in AR mode (augmented reality)
• Mont-Ventoux from Malaucene 21 km
• ventoux: Sault – Mont Ventoux 26 km

A bit more set up was needed to ensure proof of the ride completions. The rides had to appear on Strava, and after much searching I found how to link my new Rouvy account to my Strava account. There is a heading called ‘Cloud’ in Settings and this is where you can make those connections.

Now that was done it was time for a test run. I chose to ride around a short course to check the feel and the upload stability. Japan seemed like a nice choice – seeing as I love the place and had already I found a National Champs TT course. I gave it a go and everything seemed to work OK with the linkage into Strava too.

1st VR Ascent from Bedoin

Prep work done, and application submitted it was time to crack on with the attempt. I started pretty early in the morning at 07:20, knowing that I’d be in for around 6-7hrs of riding with some short breaks in between summit ascents. Typically, I’ll listen to music on the turbo trainer, but this time I’d gone to the BBC Sounds App and found a great interview with Richard Hawley, so I listened happily to that whilst ascending from Bedoin and watching the augmented reality play out on my screen.

Visually, it was surprisingly engaging to ride along with, there are other cyclists along the route, who were in shot when the GPS video was taken, and I even saw two people on the video who had clearly had enough around 10Km, and were walking their bikes up the mountain! Back in the virtual world, I was on my own for quite a while, but then as people came online a few others joined behind me on the climb. 1h 45 mins after starting from Bedoin, the first summit was gained, everything felt pretty OK.

In terms of user experience, delivery of load changes were pretty drastic, there was no smoothing at all, an increase in gradient even if relatively small felt like a step change in load, and if you weren’t anticipating it, you could quite easily bog down until you’d been able to get on top of the power increase. The user interface is no where near as intuitive as Zwift and it all just feels a bit clunkier – that said, 1 down 2 to go.

2nd VR Ascent from Malaucene

Starting at 09:30, after a short coffee break I was wondering if this ascent would be anything like the real life one. Well, it wasn’t that far off to be honest, it was a drag in real life and also a drag in the virtual world. It was made a lot worse by not being an augmented reality route, all I had to follow was my pin along the road. It was ‘ok’ but it was nowhere near as interactive as Zwift and I was reaching for some further entertainment from Netflix to keep my mind occupied. As for my legs, the middle section of orange and red gradient provided some hurt opportunities and by the summit, after 2 hours of up I was feeling it in the legs for sure.

3rd VR Ascent from Sault

A slightly longer break in-between ascents this time with just under an hour off the bike, I was riding again at 12:20. Again it wasn’t an augmented reality route, so ahead of me was another 2 hours of watching my named pin make its way slowly along the mapped road. I real life, I remember this climb being a pleasant one, with a pretty gentle gradient through lavendar fields and dappled wooded roads, and this was somewhat the case with the early gradient matching my recall of real life to begin with, but there were some very steep sections in this virtual climb that did not particularly match my memory. Maybe the mind prefers to recall the nice parts?

By the first sections of red just under half way through, I was pedalling squares. My cadence was dropping to 60rpm and below on these sections and I was standing up on the trainer just to grind through them. The drastic load demand changes going from a yellow to a red portion of road where really challenging, if I wasn’t paying attention and anticipating the change in gradient then the load change would just take my cadence down to barely nothing, then you had to really fight to increase the cadence and get your power up to match the trainer demand.

I was definitely looking forward to the summit, my legs were hurting every turn of the pedal and I could feel my knees being heavily loaded up with my lower cadence being all that I could manage. Finally after 1h 55 mins the 3rd summit was gained and I could stop pedalling. My legs were caned, and my arms were aching after having to spend a lot of the last climb out of the saddle.

Now to finish and upload the ride to Rouvy, which I had linked to my Strava account so I would have the necessary electronic proof that I had ridden the 3 summits. I had already seen the first 2 summits come through on my Strava feed shortly after finishing the ascents, but this 3rd ride was not uploading. FFS.

I moved out of the garage and into the house to ensure a strong wifi signal, I searched the internet numerous times for ‘how to recover a ride from Rouvy‘ and I waited patiently for over an hour for the activities page in the Rouvy App to complete its upload of the ride. No luck with anything. I had transitioned through being pissed off about it, and was resigned to getting back on the bike to ride the 3rd ascent again.

I was still in my cycling kit and was preparing to head back out to the garage when I thought I’d just quit the Rouvy App and start it up again. I hadn’t wanted to do this earlier as I was fearful of losing the ride data, but upon re-starting the App, within 30 seconds the last ride was uploaded and my phone pinged to notify me that I had completed a new activity on Strava! A great relief was felt that I now had the required electronic proof, and that I didn’t have to do that last climb again.

Officiating Stuff

• Registered for the ride on the Cinglés Club website on the 30th April.
• Candidate number 21727.
• Date of ride was the 2nd of May.
• Emailed electronic proof to the club on the 5th of May.
• Brevet card Received in the post 12th May.
• Brevet card populated and sent back to the club 16th May.
• Validated Brevet Card, medal and certificate received mid June.