RGT app issue or just sometime sh!t happens?

RGT
1

For the past few months RGT has been pretty stable for me. But today was complete cluster ‘fun’!

I’m on the final weekend of a five week training program designed by a local tri coach I know. Easily the most productive 5 week block of riding I have ever done. Every Friday is an approximate 30 mile race on RGT.

I have a 31 mile ride ready to go. With about two seconds before the start my w/kg drops to zero. The race starts and yes, the Sensors drop my bike. So I have to stop, get off my bike, go to my laptop, click around to Sensors, wait for it to find my bike again, then click back to the ride and start.

I am now 45 seconds late and even the very slowest rider is more than a 10th of a mile in front of me. The best riders are out of sight never to be seen again. I am sprinting off the line which is a really bad idea. As I catch the slower groups there is no opportunity to draft for a moment because their oversell pace was just to slow. I spent the opening 80% of the race riding by myself between small groups of riders.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. There seemed to be a lag between what I was doing and what I was seeing on the screen. So I cranked the gears up and jumped on the pedals. NO response from the app as I did this for about 20 seconds. I sit back down and resume normal pedaling as I try to catch my breath.

15 seconds after I resume normal pedaling, my rider starts to crank it up to 5 w/kg. A clear 35 second delay which I did another 5 or 6 times, all with the same delay. This made using what you see on screen to guide your actions totally worthless.

If a rider you were with mounted an attack, your response was 35 seconds too late. They were already 40 yards ahead of you when you responded. If you tried to adjust your speed to draft based on what you are seeing, that was 35 seconds ago and you have blown past them already.

If you want to seek a positive, I was riding all by myself because nothing on the screen was real, so no help from the other riders. But that kind of defeats the whole purpose of the platform.

So was this a one off or has anyone else experienced these issues?

2 Likes
2

I’ve read a few others complain about lag of a few seconds from time to time, but nothing like the lag you mention here. Might just have been a one-off.

Out of interest - are you still using a VPN while using RGT? If so, I’d give it a go without. I can’t think of any advantage of using a VPN with RGT to be honest. It’s just another thing in the mix that could cause issues if the VPN service is having performance issues.

2 Likes
3

No, I am running a dedicated laptop just for Systm/Rgt. The only other thing on the laptop is chrome which I use when doing No Vid rides. Nothing on the laptop of any value to anyone so the vpn isn’t even loaded on it.

I’ve read some of the other posts on a small lag, so I am hoping it was just a one-off.

1 Like
4

I raced on RGT a couple of times, a couple of years ago and had those kinds of issues. Eg. pedaling like mad but avatar not moving at all, losing connections to the group etc. Haven’t ridden a race or even a route since but will be giving it all a shot as we hunker down here on the Canadian prairies for the looooooong cold winter. Hope you get it sorted. Also, kudos to you for your recent training block. One question though…why on GvA’s scorched earth would anyone run when they could ride a bike? :rofl:

1 Like
5

Could be worth trying a router restart as well.

1 Like
6

This five week block has been exclusively cycling. Going to add running back in, most likely in Dec. For the record, not a fan of running. The only half marathons I have ever done were at the end of a half Ironman. Never done a marathon and the only ones I will ever do will be at the back end of a full Ironman. Besides, Joe assured me I would not really feel like running during these five weeks, and he was right. The plan seems simple enough, but I think Joe is actually GvA’s twin, separated at birth. :tired_face:

2 Likes
7

This morning I rode my Magic Road. I had multiple annoyances.

  1. Riding a Magic Road doesn’t just make you immediately appear the beginning of your route - After your Magic Road is ready you have to create an event that starts in 5 minutes. However, you can’t immediately join your event. You have to wait until about 1 minute before the event starts to join. And then when you do join the Magic Road has to build itself which takes longer than the remaining minute. So when I joined I had skipped the first .75 miles of my route which was the entire downhill lead-in and was already in the middle of the steep part of the initial climb. This has happened every time I create an even on a Magic Road. It would be nice if I could join my even more than a minute ahead of time. Like actually join it 5 minutes ahead of time to give the server plenty of time to process.

  2. When I did join RGT was definitely quite delayed. The power was all over the place and was nothing like what I was riding. And when I stopped pedaling it took a good 10-15 seconds for that to register on RGT and for my avatar to pull over. Fortunately the server slowly caught up, and about a minute after I started pedaling again it had almost caught up and seemed almost right-on for the rest of the ride.

I have an HDMI PC stick with an SSD and 8gb RAM that’s dedicated solely to my riding. All it has on it is SYSTM, RGT, Chrome, and Z***t. All I had running today was RGT and that’s it. And I was running RGT on low resolution.

At least the app loaded up much quicker than it used to.

1 Like
8

@emacdoug I was using my iPad for RGT but found that it lost battery quickly and also got a bit hot. It is a 2018 model so 4+ years old. I didn’t have any other major issues with it but I have been experimenting with using Apple TV 4K Gen 1 and so far (except for crashing upon exit from the program) it works well and the graphics are on medium and look really good to me.

On the website there are minimum and recommended specs but I feel like it would be nice to have some more guidance on what will work best - both now and in the future.

2 Likes