Promotional feature in association with Rouvy
Wouldn’t it be great if you could ride a mountain and get a real feel for gradients before you actually rode it? There are a plethora of platforms like VeloViewer and Google Street View that enable you to see a climb before you get to it and provide you with knowledge of what awaits, but they don’t simulate riding up whatever hill or col is next on your list.
But Rouvy does. An indoor app that broadcasts camera footage curated by both Rouvy the route team and external partners (user-generated content is also currently in the works), it allows cyclists to connect the app with their indoor trainer to ride up climbs from the comfort of their home, visually seeing exactly what they’d see if they were physically there in real life.
It’s as beneficial to performance as it is futuristic. “It’s so much more immersive and allows you to see the actual climb in front of you, and replicates the difficulties of the gradient,” says Illi Gardner, a British climber who holds the women’s Everest record and hundreds of Strava Queen of the Mountain records including on Alpe d’Huez and Mont Ventoux. “I rode up the Monte Zoncolan on Rouvy last winter and it really helped when I did it in real life. For someone like me who loves mountains, it’s really fun and makes indoor training feel more like real-life cycling.”
Boasting in excess of over 1,500 high-quality video routes from around the world, you could spend a decade riding on Rouvy and still not have ridden all the available courses. From iconic routes in Mallorca, exploring the glacial terrain of Lake Pukaki in New Zealand, or lapping Lake Garda in Italy, there are so many places in the world that you can visit from inside your own home.
There are a number of Rouvy-verified routes to explore. Some go up famous mountains, while others ascend lesser-known climbs; and some are pan-flat in the desert, while others are fast spins along the coast.
The likes of Sa Calobra, Mont Ventoux, Col du Granon, Alpe d’Huez and the Stelvio – all bucket list climbs in their own right – are all rideable on Rouvy, and Strava live segments are even incorporated into them, allowing riders to challenge themselves for as high a position as possible on virtual leaderboards. Most of the time, they’ll be chasing Gardner’s records.
If it’s experiencing big races that are more your fancy, routes from the past four Vueltas a España and the Spring Classics are also available to ride, giving you the chance to ride in the centres of Barcelona and Madrid or across Paris-Roubaix’s Forest of Arenberg. You might not literally hear the thousands of fans or literally feel the cobbles, but it’s the next best thing, virtual reality brought inside. Use the in-platform training workouts or upload sessions from Training Peaks, and all of sudden there’s an argument for saying indoor training is even better than riding outdoors itself.
Of course, cycling isn’t only about replicating race routes or pretending that you’re a pro: at the heart of bike riding is the thirst and the desire to explore, to have an adventure, and to go from A to B to see new things. Rouvy’s Best Of collections are stacked with must-do routes in the United States, Canada, Germany, France and Australia. There are even rides in Vietnam, Brazil and Japan.
Designed and founded by two Czech brothers in 2017, the ambition of Rouvy is to bring the outdoor experience indoors. Gardner certainly thinks they’ve achieved that. “It’s just so immersive,” she says. “I only really like riding up mountains, but if I want to, there are also flat routes.”
Gardner learned first-hand that there’s only really one app for cyclists who want to replicate real-life training and have the best possible knowledge of a climb or course before they physically get to it. In the case of riding through African jungles or in far-flung places, Rouvy brings a part of the world to the cyclist that they otherwise would not visit.
Find out more about Rouvy here.
