TrainingPeaks Virtual Massively Expands With New GPXplore Feature

TrainingPeaks Virtual has been expanded with a major new feature that allows you to import a GPX route and ride almost any route/road/trail in the world. As long as you have a route you’ve already ridden, or create a GPX route from any number of major platforms (Strava, Garmin, Komoot, etc…), you’re good to go! The feature, as the title suggests, is called GPXplore.

This feature allows you to ride the route’s elevations and curves, while trying to combine some of the satellite images as a base map that TrainingPeaks Virtual will then combine with 3D images to simulate the context of the surrounding landscape. Give or take an extra snow-capped mountain. However, the main thing here is to enable TrainingPeaks athletes and coaches to easily find rideable routes in the indoor training facility that connect with their smart coaches for simulation. That is the main goal, and that is achieved here.

After a few days of running, I had some light training scheduled for today, so it’s perfect to give this a whirl. So let’s dive into it.

Route Finding:

Although this part is not difficult, it is also a bit small (at least in terms of scale). You will need to first create a route elsewhere (eg, another platform), before importing it into your TrainingPeaks account. You’ll need a GPX file, either from a route you’ve already ridden (eg, extracted from Garmin Connect, or Wahoo, Hammerhead, etc…), or a route you’ve created (eg, Strava, Komoot, etc…). It doesn’t really matter a ton where you create the route, as long as it is created and has a file.

In an ideal world, TrainingPeaks would just be a place for routes from Strava, Komoot, etc… but there are all kinds of complicated businesses out there (especially on the other side), making this a lot more complicated than it needs to be.

Once you have received the file, you will need to import the file into TrainingPeaks (the website, not the TrainingPeaks Virtual app). This patch is a bit messy compared to just importing it into the app, but such is life. Log in, and on the left side you will see the routes:

From there, simply select the file you want to import:

It only takes a second, and it’s imported. It would be a nice touch if they just filled in the title for themselves, based on the name of the GPX file (currently you have to manage it manually).

Next, you’ll open TrainingPeaks Virtual (the game app), and navigate to ‘Events‘, and select from there’Add New‘. First, I would argue that this should be on the main home dashboard as an action. Zwift learned this lesson a few years ago with a systematic exercise and so on, to just put things people want on the homepage (especially newly created/newly created things). After all, the whole point of TrainingPeaks buying this platform was for deep integration. Now that the integration is in place, don’t hide it by having people create single events. Just make it a simple button.

Anyway, go create an event, and you’ll see the ‘My Routes’ option below:

Also, I would argue that if I choose a route name, it should just fill that in as a title. I know these sound like petty nitpicking (and they are), but it’s all about quick workflows for time-poor athletes. Reducing conflict. The good thing is that George and the TPV team are incredibly quick to implement suggestions (the fastest in the industry).

Note that if you scroll down, you can select a Biome, which controls the environment around you.

Also, if you scroll down in these settings, there are options like how many bots are on board with you, do they require a code, etc… At first I didn’t even realize there was a scroll bar, let alone other options.

In any case, from there it creates an event at a given time, and you can copy that to friends. Look, I get it, this feature was based on creating event routes, rather than individual athletes. But I would argue (again) that TP’s whole purpose in buying this platform (IndieVelo) was for the individual athlete. I just want to ride the route right now, not plan for the future with more clicks. Also, reduce friction, reduce clicks, increase onboarding time.

And don’t get me started on how this event doesn’t show up under my events. I have to add code to see my own event that I just created, otherwise this section is empty. But why?

When I tap on it, I can see event details, including route, profile, etc… all of which looks good to me.

Of course, once you tap ‘Let’s ride’, you need to wait until the event starts (the fastest you can create is 5 minutes). I brought this concern to TrainingPeaks, and it sounds like they are already there, intending to simplify/correct this soon.

Basically, what I want is this:

1) Import GPX to TrainingPeaks (web)
2) Option to tap ‘Ride Now’ on the TrainingPeaks Virtual Home Dashboard
3) Immediately start riding the route

Speaking of which, let’s take a look at how it works when you start riding.

Trail Ride:

If that is sorted, you will be placed in the starting pen until the event starts. Even in a private event (as mine was, just me), you’ll be joined by 29 other pretend riders (boats) by default. You can change this in the settings.

I thought it was a bit interesting to see how TPV covered the first pen loop on the roads here. You can see a satellite image below it, and this is usually a quiet four-way intersection.

In any case, we went. The route that TPV creates is basically the same route to your GPX file, from the elevation/gradient/turning route. What is different, however, is what surrounds the road, and the road itself (as I will see later). So, for example, here on the quiet street around my home, here’s how it looks in the game compared to real life:

As much as I would love for the mountains to magically surround the island like in a James Bond movie (and have snow), that’s not the case either.

However, the ups/downs of the road are real, which made it fun to fly down the hill at 75KPH which often has turns that you can’t do more than 50KPH for fear of ending up with sheep.

There seem to be some bugs to be worked out with parts of the lanes overlapping, this causes fences for riders to…ummm…navigate. This seems to happen whenever the route doubles itself.

Likewise, there are times when cyclists appear to be using non-UCI compliant bikes, pushing so hard that they melt into the pavement.

However, in terms of the overall up/down of the course, it captures it well. Having ridden this route more times than I can count, he did a great job there.

However, the environment is not very good. In terms of its closeness it was the one point where I dived near the water in the U-Turn, and it showed its essence:

Here it is in real life:

However, it is difficult to replicate everything in the world. In many ways, this is similar to RGT’s Magic Roads concept, where you can generate a route based on a GPX file. Like Tacx has had for 15 years (see my review from 2011 of this concept). And there are, of course, countless other small apps that do this too.

However, having it in a large/common application is beneficial for many people, and in the case of TrainingPeaks itself, this is the most common case. Many times over the past few years, my wife (oh, like me, has been using TP for almost 20 years) wants to ride a certain route for an upcoming race (eg, Ironman XYZ or Challenge XYZ), just to understand the general elevation/descent. In the past, we have tried to find a route on Rouvy or Fulgaz, or at one time, we messed with the Tacx app. All of which provide more visual information (full videos in the case of Rouvy/Fulgaz), but in most cases you may not really care about the location, and just want the elevation profile. This solves that.

Still, great stuff, and I’m looking forward to seeing the TrainingPeaks Virtual team make some small tweaks here to make the process easier. Knowing their history in making such changes, I suspect it will be done tomorrow at lunch. Maybe even breakfast.

With that – thanks for reading!

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