Cycling Through The Pandemic

Part 2 - Racing restarts 2021

2021 looked like it’d go the same way as 2020, with massive levels of infection, illness and death following the foolish decision by our pathetic and incompetent Government to grandstand over "not cancelling Christmas".  However, things did settle a bit, and by mid-April we felt able to start running our 2021 series of club time trials.

We planned how to do this in a Covid-safe way, taking the following measures:

1. We decided to use an online entry system offered by local sports timing company ResultsBase. This turned out to be really useful, it means that we don’t handle cash on the day, which has always been a bit of a hassle and is clearly a potential infection route. Plus, while we don’t have the numbers of riders to justify chip timing, ResultsBase do offer a phone app which uploads start and finish times to their website, meaning results are available as soon as a rider finishes.

2. None of our events use indoor HQs. This may be a bit of PITA in adverse weather, but at least we are kept ventilated.

3. We collected and disinfected numbers at the end of each event.

All things considered, our club events were a resounding success, with larger numbers of riders than we’d seen in several years. Some of this is probably down to the lack of mush else in the way of competitive cycling, but also the reach and visibility of the ResultsBase website.

I won’t review each an every event, but suffice to say that a year of pretty heavy indoor training and losing a significant amount of body weight meant my performances were on the whole stronger than in recent years.

I wound up taking 3rd place in the Open League Table (and best placed NBRC rider) and first place in the Veterans’ League Table, which is based on placings on veteran standards.

On the other hand, I had a pretty slender number of open time trials, mostly because my weekends tended to be distrupted by family matters.

Duo Normand

Despite a brief bit of activity in the registration front in the autumn, the Duo Normand was cancelled for a second year. Hopefully it will run again for 2022.

Indoor training platforms

I continued using Zwift pretty intensively, not doing any events but riding on my own. I did take part in a couple of group rides with work colleagues. By August I had reached the top level in the game (Level 50), and I cast my eyes around for alternatives to Zwift.

Rouvy - This platform offers an enhanced reality video experience. It’s pretty good, but the cartoon-ish enhanced reality elements jar a bit with the videos they use. I did a couple of rides through a trial subscription, but decided not to go with it for the time being.

RGT - This platform is notable for requiring not just a device to run the app (in my case a large iPad Pro) but a phone to run the controller. It’s widely reputed to have good simulation physics, particularly when riding with others. The other main selling point comes with the fully paid up subscription - you can email in gps files of favourite routes, and they will generate the virtual route. I think it doesn’t bear much relationship with the actual scenery, but does have all the twists and turns and gradients of the original route. Because I was on the trial subscription I wasn’t able to submit my own routes. Other than those routes, there seemed to be a very small number of worked-up routes. I didn’t think the animation was that great, plus you seemed to have to be lucky to see someone else out on the route.

FulGaz - This platform focusses on excellent quality video recordings tied to gps routes. The video playback speed varies depending how fast you are riding in relation to that of the bike on which the camera was mounted. In turn, your speed depends on the usual factors such as power, bike weight, body weight and so forth. It feels pretty good. The software has loads of options and includes those to repeat a lap over and over again, or to just use a fixed video speed. It’s hugely immersive, especially on a big screen - you should see me jump on the brakes when an accident seems imminent. You can download the videos to a local server or to the device you’re using to run FulGaz. Recent changes have meant streaming directly from their servers does work a bit better than in the past, but can still be susceptible to glitches.

Summary - How does this play out for my training from late 2021 through to 2022? I use Zwift generally for relatively easy unsctuctured riding. My main training programme comes from TrainerRoad, which I’ve not described here. this offers a great many different interval sessions, supplied in an easily understandable format. The problem I’ve always had is the tedium of the format when the going gets tough, and the sessions get long. And many of my TrainerRoad sessions are tough and are 1h30m or longer. My solution has been to run TrainerRoad and FulGaz on the same iPad, with TrainerRoad controlling my Tacx Neo turbo trainer and FulGaz in responsive mode. This gives enough visual distraction to keep the tedium at bay.

To run both these apps on the same device with limited numbers of Bluetooth connections available from the turbo and HRM needs a bit of tinkering about - the Northwind CABLE is the device you need. It picks up ANT+ and retransmits it as a BTLE signal. 

Using the CABLE, I connect devices as follows:

Polar H10 HRM: BT connection to my watch, BT connection to TrainerRoad, ANT+ connection to CABLE

Tacx Neo: BT connection to TrainerRoad, ANT+ connection to CABLE

CABLE supplies BT connections with Power, Cadence and Speed to FulGaz. It could include turbo trainer control, but I leave that with TrainerRoad as a direct BT connection.

This all works really well on my iPad Pro. In use I plug the iPad into an old TV monitor and the main FulGaz video shows on that, with the TrainerRoad remaining on the iPad screen (see the picture).