For tonight’s ride I opted for RGT Cycling’s Borrego Springs route, which is one I have tried to ride before, but last time suffered from a rather odd bug.
There were no issues (at least, with the ride itself) tonight.
As the picture above describes, this is a largely flat route, in a standard rectangular pattern, covering 7.7km per lap, with 19m of elevation / 1% average gradient per lap.
Of the three routes I have now tried of RGT Cycling, I have to say, this one was the least enjoyable.
The best way to describe this one is as though you are riding around a trailer park.
There is little to see in terms of scenery, which made any visual glitches all the more obvious. Largely this is wide open desert / sand, with few buildings, and some mountains off in the distance.
I found the mountains to draw as I rode along, which considering they were the most prominent thing on screen (aside from the rider and road) was highly noticeable.
There was also more obvious glitching in the distance. Blue, yellow, red… these weird blobs kept appearing as I cycled along. At first I thought they were cars in the distance, but alas no. Whatever they were, they weren’t a concern to the ride, but they were not supposed to be there.
For this ride I decided to do an old school free ride. Something I used to do a lot on Zwift, and something I talked about in the recent Weekly Review.
The idea was to see how quickly I could get to 10km.
Spoiler alert: I covered 10km in 18 minutes 9 seconds.
But was this fair?
One thing that RGT Cycling does differently to Zwift is that it slows you down into corners.
You cannot control this, it just happens. It’s more realistic than Zwift, but does it compromise the amount of distance I covered as a result? Probably not by much, but I still feel like it wasn’t a truly fair comparison.
That said, I just wasn’t feeling it on this ride.
Yesterday I didn’t ride for a couple of reasons:
I struggled to sleep on Sunday night. In the end, I think I managed ~4 hours. As such I was absolutely dead at work on Monday.
But worse, I ended up in a long, over running meeting late in the afternoon, meaning I was home at 5.10, instead of my usual 4.10.
Combined, I just couldn’t find the will to get on the bike.
Even tonight, it took a concerted effort to get on the bike. I think I’ve caught a cold from office germs.
The trees are nicer on RGT Cycling than on Zwift 
Couple this lack of motivation with next to no one on the map, and the frankly dull scenery, and I just couldn’t put in a performance I’d have liked too.
I’m struggling lately, I know that much.
I checked the scales before jumping on the bike and was alarmed to see 11 stone 7lb on the read out. I can’t work out how I’ve gone from 11 stone 1lb to this in just a few weeks. My diet simply hasn’t changed that dramatically.
About the only saving grace this evening was that I managed 23.9km of distance in 45 minutes.
I’m going to give both my ride overall and this map in particular a solid 5 out of 10.
I’d be hard pressed to ride this circuit again, in truth.
That said, whilst scanning the map choices, I did notice RGT Cycling has two very climb-y looking maps. With my desire to do a solid climb ride each week, this is looking to have great potential on that front.
Sadly, after finishing my ride and coming to write up this blog post, I found RGT Cycling had no uploaded my ride to Strava.
This wasn’t too much of an issue, as unlike Zwift, the RGT Cycling app makes it super easy to email myself a copy of the GPX workout file for use on other sites.
Weirdly, this file worked fine as an upload in to Strava, but not as a direct upload to Training Peaks.
Instead, I had to upload the GPX file to Strava, and then re-download it from Strava and upload that file to Training Peaks.
How bizarre.
I’m feeling down about my fitness, my ability, and my weight at the moment.
Tomorrow is likely to be the next FTP Builder ride, all being well. It’s 1h 15 minutes long, so all depends on how quickly I can get home (hopefully quick, due to school half term roads), and the tea time situation.
