Testing Rouvy - my advice - DON'T

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That was something I forgot to mention in my comments about Fulgaz. While SYSTM sends emails and makes the .fit data files from the ride available instantly, Fulgaz often has quite a delay in making your results available. Usually minutes, occasionally many minutes, once it took two days…

And the Fulgaz calculated calorie burn for the ride is just wrong.

I use my cycling computer to record ride data and upload it rather than using the Fulgaz data, because the I the Fulgaz .fit file contains the locations and elevations of the simulated ride, which I did not actually ride.

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What I meant is that if you have used another app that connects to your trainer you want to make sure it is not still trying to connect and control your trainer instead of Fulgaz. Rides that you download should show up at the bottom of your screen, below all of the other selections. Sorry you had a bad experience.

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When I reloaded the program again, the ride did show up in my ride history. Very odd that it doesn’t appear until you close the program and relaunch. Similarly, I had to manually tell it to upload to strava, it didn’t do that automatically.

As for the download option, it too only appeared when I reloaded the program. Hopefully now that I have the first ride done, things will work as they are supposed to.

My one issue with the ride itself is the lack of detail before you do the ride. Having no frame of reference I just picked a ride that looked ok. It was except for one thing. Given the absence of detail, I didn’t know that at one point in the ride the climb exceeded 17%. I am not a great climber and that pushed my limits. No problem with being pushed, but had it gone much higher, say 20%+, not sure I could have done it. Then I am deep into a ride that I can’t finish because I stall out on a climb I didn’t expect.

I guess we are back to all these programs have their shortcomings.

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The summary usually provides some description of how steep the ride gets and you have the benefit of seeing the graphic profile before starting. This brings up a major difference between Fulgaz and other platforms. When you see a grade listed at 15 percent, it will actually feel like 15 percent unless you adjust the ride preferences. On platforms like Zwift, the grade listed is not realistically tied to your resistance. If I do a big climb on Fulgaz I feel like I actually accomplished something.

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Too bad there isn’t a “get off and walk” option. Or, even better, a “catch a ride in the SAG wagon.” Those are the real world solutions to a hill you can’t climb mid ride.

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This is true but as a new user I have no feel for how steep a climb will be based on that. And the narrative did not provide any detail as to how steep. Again, just my first ride so time will tell.

The one thing Rouvy did get right was the ability to move your cursor over any part of the ride and see the exact grade. And I would agree, the resistance you feel on Fulgaz is much more realistic than anything I have tried to date.

One other question, I am not at all sure what the toughness score is. I get it that a higher score is a ‘tougher’ ride, but by what metrics. All of us have different strengths and weaknesses. Something with a lot of long/hard climbs I am going to find more difficult than someone who is a good climber. On the other hand, an imperial century , even with rolling hills, would be easier for me than a 20 mile ride with steep climbs. Just curious about the methodology.

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I had to do this once. It was a very steep hill in the middle of a very long ride. Good thing is I wasn’t the only one.

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Hi @Critmark i came across another app last year which is a lot cheaper than most other apps but it does have some drawbacks, it’s called Open World but it’s only available on Windows 10, I only had a Mac and had to create a partition on my Mac to get it to work also you need to get an Ant + sensor whether you’d experience even worse dropout than Bluetooth I can’t say. You can download any ride of the loads mentioned but most unfortunately are climbing ones. The good thing though is that the graphic of the screen shows you the gradients for the ride ie if your doing a 12 mile ride it will show how many miles you do at each gradient ie 1-3%, 4-6%, 7-9% and more which is good to know before you start, compared to other apps when I got it it was £6.99 a month most others range from £9.99 to over £15.99 so you can see the difference. Here’s a link https://bikethe.world/ but like I say it’s Windows 10 and above and Ant + only but I’ve had a lot less problems with it than most of my other apps I’ve tried.

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I had to walk up the end of a hill last summer. My wife found a driveway about 2/3 up and stopped for a minute to catch her breath and let her legs recover. Then she rode up the rest of the way. I wasn’t that smart and blew up about 150 feet from the top. It took me a minute before I could even walk. A lower gear would have really helped.

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FF has get off and waddle sections with penguins, turtles and sound effects! :penguin::turtle:

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Ill test it someday :grin: havent tested yet because I didnt liked fullgaz and I guess the concept of ridding in a virtual avatar in real videos some had not a very good quality is just not apealing to me.

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@SSaldanha I am about 5 days in on Fulgaz. I like the videos here better than Rouvy so if you don’t like Fukgaz, you won’t like Rouvy. Overall, both have issues for me. Fulgaz lacks any real insight into a ride beyond a graph with no available metrics. Yesterday I turned a corner on a ride and was met with a 20% hill climb. Climbing is a weakness and it was a very quick down shift and jump to my feet. I had no way of knowing that was anywhere on the ride in advance.

Also, last night the Fulgaz app wouldn’t load my ride history. I sent an email to them with a screen shot of the blank screen. All I got back was “that’s odd” and if they are deleted they can’t be recovered. They ignored entirely the fact that I had not deleted them. Now they were uploaded to Strava so I have them but a poor response IMO.

I have just over a week left of my free trial on Fugaz but will likely drop it even before that.

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Yet another Fulgaz flaw. I did a new ride on Fulgaz and in addition to a known issue for me, I confirmed a second flaw and discovered a BIG new one.

I finished my Everesting challenge yesterday so I thought I would try one of their recovery rides. From the graph it looked like it had one manageable hill to open and then mostly downhill or rollers the rest of the way. Because there is no real data on the rides, I had no way to know that the opening climb had sections at almost 9% and an average or around 7%. For a poor climber like myself, this was far from a recovery. Way more effort than I wanted to expend this evening.

I did however confirm a flaw I was seeing in other rides. The ride data posted on the site is either wrong or the programming is flawed. Each of the past three rides have come up short on elevation gain. I could understand if it was off a foot or two given the conversion from meters to feet. But two of the rides were off by over 5%, the worse of the two almost 6%. That is nothing but poor quality control.

And now the new issue. There is no consistency on the speed at which the rides are recorded. Each is dependent on the rider who shot the video. Fulgaz has two individual options for running the videos. First is Steady mode. It runs at the speed it was recorded at. If it is a 17 mile ride and it was completed in 1 hour, you will be clocked at 17 MPH. You may actually ride it faster or slower, and that speed will appear o the bike computer graphic, but it will not be recorded.

The other option is Reactive mode. The video will move at the speed you are riding. So if you ride that 17 mile ride at 19 MPH you will finish in under an hour. That can be a cool feature if there was some consistency in the speed of the rider who shot the video, but that is not the case.

On the ride I did yesterday, the climbs I was doing at about 0.65 (65 % of the speed of the rider who recorded the ride. That was consistent across a few videos. As I said, bad climber. But I would make up for it on the downhills. I would consistently run at 1.40 – 1.50, or 40% to 50% faster than the recorded speed. At several points, in my highest gear, at 105 RPM I would hit 2.00 or twice as fast as the recorded speed. Side note, you can’t exceed 2.00.

However, on today’s ride, my climbs were consistent with the previous rides. But on the downhills, I struggled to reach 1.00, the speed at which the video was recorded. Even in my top gear, spinning at 110-115, I was only running a 0.95, or slower that the rider’s speed.

The so what of that is the distance and speed posted for a ride are absolutely meaningless. The wide variances in the speed of the rider that recorded it aberrates those numbers so no two rides are going to execute the same in terms of distance and time.

This recovery ride that has a difficulty rating less than half of the ride I did yesterday took me four and a half minutes longer to do than the posted time and yesterday’s tougher, longer ride with much more climbing I did four minutes faster than posted.

If you want to just do rides and don’t care about any stats, planning, accuracy or consistency, then this platform is fine. If you care about any one or more of these things, then you will be greatly disappointed.

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Congratulations on the Everesting! And thanks for the detailed explanation.

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I can only agree with this. It is really a matter of taste and I am also more a fan of real-life routes rather than the virtual world. I love it that with Rouvy I can visit places during winter months right from my living room.

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Doing a vEveresting on RGT this month will most likely make you the vEveresting record holder forever :thinking::wink:

I was ruminating the idea of a vEveresting on RGT myself but the RGT shutdown caught me by surprise and I will not make it due to insufficient form .:sob:

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It would, except I posted this (and competed it) in April 2022!

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Looks like I didn’t get the memo :man_facepalming::grin:. Great effort, though.
However, I guess there’s plenty of segments left which have not been vEverestested. And I won’t tell which one I did had an eye on.

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WAITAMINNIT!? When did you do a vEveresting? How is it that I never heard this? What hill did you do? What platform did you use? How long did it take?

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I’ve been considering vEveresting for a long time, but don’t have the money for gears that would let me do it on a hill that makes sense. Because the type that suits me are shallower and would take forever. How many times would I have to ride up that dang volcano? I’m sure I’d probably forget to hit the u-turn button and screw it up.