When I loaded MyWhoosh today I saw a new map available. I’m not sure when this one came up, but the “UCI World” was available – not sure if it was “UCI World”, or named “UCI” in association with the Worlds. I should really pay more attention. Anyway, I’m going with UCI World.
So, UCI World has three routes available. They must not be near each other, as I didn’t get an option to divert off the route I was on.
This one was rather imaginatively called Stage 2.
There are three routes as I say, Stage 1, Stage 2, and Stage 3. The marketing department must have been on holiday that day.
I gather these are for the UCI tie-in with MyWhoosh, where they will be holding some competition or other. Interestingly MyWhoosh do have billboards in-game that tell you about upcoming events, of which some event was being advertised. Again, I didn’t pay attention – but more on why in a moment.
This being a new map, it was given the nice graphical treatment similar to the USA map. As such it ran silky smooth at the frame rate capped 30 fps. Lovely.
And it looks really nice, too. Lots of detail, deers dancing around, cows, trains, airplanes flying over head – that’s what the funky rainbow is, it’s smoke from the planes.
Enough about the visuals.
The route – well, I was on 0% realism, thank God.
Because this one’s a brute.
The lap is short – 8.9km. But each lap has about 200m of climb, and most of that comes in the form of one grinding ascent, which gets steeper nearest the summit.
After that you rip down a spiral loop, into a cool futuristic tunnel, before heading back out to ‘catch your breath’ (on another little climb) before starting it all again. I bet they make the pros do that one, oh, at least 7 times or more.
I have been slowly creeping my time on the bike back up, managing 40 minutes today. Pretty pleased with that. The power’s not there, but I’m on my way at least.
Why I wasn’t paying attention so much was because I brought my work laptop with me, and worked a good chunk of this one. That’s good, because it kills off two birds with one stone, and really does get rid of a lot of the boredom I face on the turbo. It does, however, mean I miss or forget a lot of detail when it comes to writing these posts.
Oh well!
One more tomorrow, then I am quite looking forward to my first Friday rest day in some time.
