BigRingVR - it's the best virtual ride ever.

cougie

Aah ok. That does sound more interesting than I thought. I e seen the virtual spin stuff at the gym that seems dull as ditchwater.

dabber

As it's currently free I'd say just give it a try Cougie.
As an aside, you can also add your own rides mp4 plus gpx files. Very easy to do. I've done a few of my French rides ... easier to do with the French ones as no traffic and virtually no start/stop. I then created some Strava segments for the virtual rides which mirror the real life ones... the sensation/feel is pretty identical and my Strava segment virtual versus real life times are totally consistent.

daniel_b

I just gave this another go this morning, was looking for something not particularly challenging, and around the hour mark.

Really struggled to find anything remotely flattish, or rolling, climbs definitely seem to be the main focus.

Picked Valle Dei Forni in Italy, estimated ride time was 45 minutes.
Discarded the ride to start with, as it was steep at the beginning, and didn't think I was going to be able to complete it - not sure if I have a short range cassette on the back, never an issue with trainerroad, but suspect it might be with BigRing.

One issue I realised is that I was going in cold, and immediately having to put out over 200 watts - I went again though, and stuck with it, and got through the initial harder bit, and there was a flattish bit in the middle that was over before I knew it, and then the last 3km was pretty steep -up to 15.8% I think.
I had no issues with the altitude though ;-)

I downloaded the video, although one slight irritation is that last time I used it you could keep 4 videos locally, now it is only 1 - can't figure out why they made this change.

Quality was excellent, and I got used to the sometimes slowmo cyclists\other traffic, and it did not detract from the ride.
Realised afterwards I had it on mute, but assume there is no music or soundtrack anyway?

Felt very slow, but looking on the site, can see I placed 12th out of 24 - so not too bad, but nothing amazing.
Think I was mostly hampered by the rear gearing, as spent a lot of time in the smallest gear, if it's a 32 on there, I can't see how I could ever hope to get up one of the really long and steep climbs.
My cadence sometimes dropped to the 50's, and I normally ride in the 80's\90's.

I didn't realise you could race 'against' other cyclists, or presumably your own run?
Didn't notice where you could do this, but equally was not looking.
Would certainly make it more interesting to ride against yourself, slower riders, and faster riders, would be quite a good measure I think. Have to see if I can locate where to do this.

bendertherobot

Dunno if you can do this in BigRing but there's a setting on Fulgaz, wheel size possibly, that allows you to replicate different gear sizes, so, in effect, if you have a 28t you can see what it would be like with a 32t.

daniel_b

bendertherobot wrote:

Dunno if you can do this in BigRing but there's a setting on Fulgaz, wheel size possibly, that allows you to replicate different gear sizes, so, in effect, if you have a 28t you can see what it would be like with a 32t.

Thanks BTR, will have a dig about - that would be useful, as don't want to change the rear cassette purely for this really.

dabber

Daniel B wrote:

I just gave this another go this morning, was looking for something not particularly challenging, and around the hour mark.

Really struggled to find anything remotely flattish, or rolling, climbs definitely seem to be the main focus.

Picked Valle Dei Forni in Italy, estimated ride time was 45 minutes.
Discarded the ride to start with, as it was steep at the beginning, and didn't think I was going to be able to complete it - not sure if I have a short range cassette on the back, never an issue with trainerroad, but suspect it might be with BigRing.

One issue I realised is that I was going in cold, and immediately having to put out over 200 watts - I went again though, and stuck with it, and got through the initial harder bit, and there was a flattish bit in the middle that was over before I knew it, and then the last 3km was pretty steep -up to 15.8% I think.
I had no issues with the altitude though ;-)

I downloaded the video, although one slight irritation is that last time I used it you could keep 4 videos locally, now it is only 1 - can't figure out why they made this change.

Quality was excellent, and I got used to the sometimes slowmo cyclists\other traffic, and it did not detract from the ride.
Realised afterwards I had it on mute, but assume there is no music or soundtrack anyway?

Felt very slow, but looking on the site, can see I placed 12th out of 24 - so not too bad, but nothing amazing.
Think I was mostly hampered by the rear gearing, as spent a lot of time in the smallest gear, if it's a 32 on there, I can't see how I could ever hope to get up one of the really long and steep climbs.
My cadence sometimes dropped to the 50's, and I normally ride in the 80's\90's.

I didn't realise you could race 'against' other cyclists, or presumably your own run?
Didn't notice where you could do this, but equally was not looking.
Would certainly make it more interesting to ride against yourself, slower riders, and faster riders, would be quite a good measure I think. Have to see if I can locate where to do this.

If you click on SELECT RIDE you will see a list of riders.. you can select up to 5 by clicking on them. You will also see a "Use Pacer" box. Click on that and then select the power out put you want the pacer to ride at.

Also, if you go to the preferences bit you can go to the "Smart Trainer tab and there are some sliders there where you can limit gradients etc... I've never used that myself but you could play with that.

Machoman121

FYI - i rode Alp de Huez about 98% on granny gear - a triple chainring and 10 speed with a 32 size cassette. No complains there as i believe that's how it probably is in real life on the huez. Some people just got good legs and some don't.

I'm not complaining - I want the realism of the climb.

daniel_b

Machoman121 wrote:

FYI - i rode Alp de Huez about 98% on granny gear - a triple chainring and 10 speed with a 32 size cassette. No complains there as i believe that's how it probably is in real life on the huez. Some people just got good legs and some don't.

I'm not complaining - I want the realism of the climb.

Cheers MM :-)

Just to be clear, I wasn't suggesting the program and my turbo were making it more difficult.than in reality, guarantee it is my legs that are the weak link.

Some 9% bits felt pretty much identical to a section near me.
Pretty sure my turbo bike doesn't have a wide range rear cassette, although admittedly do have a compact up front.

If I can reduce the resistance somehow through the app, then that should in theory give me a smaller gear, i'll report back!

phil485

Just had a play. Found it ok if you want to do some climbing training. Need to play more before full judgement.

PhilipPirrip

Phil485 wrote:

Just had a play. Found it ok if you want to do some climbing training. Need to play more before full judgement.

If you want some variety you could download some RLVs from from sites like;

http://rlv-stormarn.de/

http://www.route4u.dk/index.php (I notice that Route4U will be only open to members at the end of the year)

And, if it's your wont, you might be able to find old Tacx films on torrent sites.

daniel_b

Dabber wrote:

If you click on SELECT RIDE you will see a list of riders.. you can select up to 5 by clicking on them. You will also see a "Use Pacer" box. Click on that and then select the power out put you want the pacer to ride at.

Also, if you go to the preferences bit you can go to the "Smart Trainer tab and there are some sliders there where you can limit gradients etc... I've never used that myself but you could play with that.

Thanks for this Dabber - this afternoon had a go at Sorfjorden to Odda

Rolling I think best describes it - this time, thanks to your tips, I spotted the area where you could choose 5 other riders to ride against so picked 5 of differing power outputs - was level with the 3rd one for a while, but then dropped away, and finished around 3 minutes behind him I think.

So finished 4th out of 6 effectively - I was 30 seconds up on my closest follower at one point, and this dropped to 19 seconds - funny how much that figure made me work, as I pedalled without a break for the whole darned thing, messing about with the gears to keep my cadence where I wanted it.
Despite it dropping to 19, either his ride got slower, or I warmed up and got faster (It felt the latter, but may be a combination) as I ended up with a 1 minute gap to him.
Power output for the 1:13:50 was 199 watts average, and compared to TR, this works out quite well, as my 60 minute power on TR is 196, and 90 is 183 - cadence was 88, which is in the right ballpark for what I deem best for me.

Overall, my time is 39th out of 114, so not quite top 3rd.
My power output, is only bettered by one person - let me try and explain that better - only one person with a faster time has a lower power output.

I also reduced the resistance from 100% to 90% - though on this course I probably could have managed with 100%, but thought it best to try and find a resistance level I could in theory run with on any of the courses, and simply stick with that - not sure if that will work for a real col - will find out in due course I guess.

I chose to download the video, in HD I think it was, as I enabled it, and it only took 15 minutes I think.
Quality was excellent - put no music on, but can see how that could improve things a bit.

Overall, very very impressed - very immersive, great scenery, really challenging, and one of the hardest, if not structured workouts I have done this year, and that was without overly kind of thinking about it if you get where I am coming from.
I was watching my power, my cadence, and the gap to my 'competitors' such as they were.
Due to the gap being displayed, it also meant I still worked like a demon even on the downhills :twisted:

If they could somehow give you some visual sign of where the competitors are on the road, I think that would be a good step forwards personally, and if there was anyway to slipstream to help you catch up or pull away with a group, that would also be ace.

Two things that stand out for me, aside from the quality of it, is that you really need to warm up first, and you really should warm down too - my calves are still feeling it!

vinnymarsden

Rode D Huez in summer for real and BRVR was actually harder!!!
Everything moves in super slow motion including the cars which makes it a bit unrealistic, but the video quality is excellent, saw more of it on BRVR than in real life!!!!

dabber

Daniel B wrote:

Two things that stand out for me, aside from the quality of it, is that you really need to warm up first, and you really should warm down too - my calves are still feeling it!

You can create warmup/down rides from any of the rides by going on the "Select Ride" page and going to the "Create New Course" section. You can move the sliders and edit a course ... perhaps a nice downhill few miles as a warm up.

Machoman121

in Veloreality there is a horizontal circle that represents your own previous performance and it moves further or behind depending on your current speed. Only certain segments of the ride gets recorded for the circle.

These virtual rides would make excellent time trial tests. I wonder why no big cycling events or organisation would take up such a useful feature of virtual cycling.

daniel_b

Dabber wrote:

Daniel B wrote:

Two things that stand out for me, aside from the quality of it, is that you really need to warm up first, and you really should warm down too - my calves are still feeling it!

You can create warmup/down rides from any of the rides by going on the "Select Ride" page and going to the "Create New Course" section. You can move the sliders and edit a course ... perhaps a nice downhill few miles as a warm up.

Thanks Dabber - will look into that.
For the time being, I am going to have a crack at La Berarde this afternoon, with a bit of manual warm up beforehand.

daniel_b

Wow, well that was good but hard - didn't have any time to warm up, so went straight in.

Chose 5 other riders, across a range, and also set the pacer this time, at 205 watts.

Didn't spot anywhere (After choosing the route) to pick a bit to create a warm up though.

Became apparent, that although I set the resistance to 90% last time, this is not really viable, as on this ride there is a steepish climb fairly near the start, and I'm there at 60rpm pushing out more than my FTP in the lowest gear I have, and soon find myself infront of all 5 other riders, and the pacer!

Clearly unsustainable, and in the end I slipped behind 3 of the other riders, but ended up a good 2 minutes+ clear of my pacer which I was pleased with.

End figures were:
Cadence - 77 (Eeeek!)
Power - 215

I did manage a minor warm down at the end, but then had to get a move onto get back to work.

Really good workout though, but one weird thing I noticed, is that I drink about half the amount I do when I am using TrainerRoad - perhaps as TR is more structured, and there are more valleys when you can drink plenty, where as this feels like it has to be full bore for the whole thing - well assuming you want to keep ahead of, or challenge the other times you are seeing.

My plan, due to the ridiculous cadence, is to drop the resistance another 10% to 80%, and see how we go next time - I basically need to give msyelf the room to set my cadence vaguely correctly - and if it's my fault, by a combination of lack of power, and wrong gear ratios, then as long as this gives me a getout, all well and good.
If it needs to go to 70 or lower, then I guess that's fine - can probably calibrate it fairly well on something like Ventoux I guess.

Seriously considering changing my TR workout plans, and swapping to low volume, and then popping in one or two of these a week, as time allows, to mix things up a bit.

Glad this thread has got me to go back on it, it's really rather good.
Just surprised on some of the routes, so few people have completed them - ie this one, I am 9th out of 21 - although I appreciate some of them may have completed it more than once presumably.

dabber

Daniel B wrote:

Didn't spot anywhere (After choosing the route) to pick a bit to create a warm up though.

Daniel... let's see if I can clarify a bit better where this is.....

On the first page that you are presented with when you log into BRVR you will see a list of rides graphically shown down the LH side and from which you can scroll down.

On the RH side of that page is a photo from the ride that is highlighted (by you) on the LH side plus the elevation map.
In between the photo and the elevation map is a box with a button labelled "Create New Course".

If you click that another window will open and within that window you can move start and end sliders to edit and generate your personalised version of that ride. You can save this and label it.
If you want a warm up ride ready to hand then just create it and it will be visible and available to you any time you go to this ride.
Hope makes sense?

daniel_b

Thanks Dabber, appreciate you taking the time - will have a look tomorrow when I fire up that laptop :-)

dabber

As part of BRVR's democratic process you can vote for the next ride that they will release tomorrow.

https://www.strava.com/clubs/187025/posts/839784

daniel_b

Just had my Road Grand Tours beta account approved :-)
Back on TR this afternoon as well - much as I like the video to look at, I also like the harder sections in a structured workout, and the recovery valleys - plus managed to watch a documentary about Le Mans from 1981 which was pretty cool, off of the BBC iplayer archive, some right little gems on there.

daniel_b

RGT downloaded and installed, on a 64 bit Windows 7 machine - go to launch it, and it crashes with an unrecoverable error :-(

Tried it a few times, no way around it - no time to be logging calls, so have just uninstalled it, and will wait until I have a Win 10 machine, probably in the next couple of weeks.
Shame, as this machine is the one with a big (For laptops) screen, and the other one is a comparitive tiddler.
Not the best start!

dabber

Just seen the latest update from BigRingVR on coming rides. This is just what's to come on top of all the rides that have regularly been added throughout the year. A nice little summary video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biAySwVMyBE

No lack of variety for the coming winter.

Jacksyee

Does it upload to training peaks as well? With cadence, hr, power data?

dabber

Jacksyee wrote:

Does it upload to training peaks as well? With cadence, hr, power data?

The ride is saved as a tcx file which is acceptable to training peaks so I guess the answer is yes. As far as I am aware, there is not an automatic upload to TP though and you would need to manually upload it. There is an automatic upload option to Strava. If you want to check that out just ask them direct. They are very responsive.