I’ve been meaning to do another MyWhoosh ride for a while now, and given the choice today between Zwift’s The Crow Road climb portal ride, or something similar on MyWhoosh, I figured I’d at least check out the routes on offer and ride there if I found something similar.
The Crow Road clocks in at 250m climb over 7km at an average of 3.5% gradient, making it a Category 3 climb.
I picked Alto del Aguila on MyWhoosh, a 350m ascent over ~5km at an average of 5.9%, making it a Category 2 climb. These are my own calculations, as I couldn’t find the info anywhere regarding the actual average gradient of this climb in game.
Prior to my ride I had assumed these two climbs were roughly similar.
One nice thing about this route / climb was that it gave a generous lead in. I’ve found that isn’t the case on climb portal rides, meaning you need to warm up elsewhere and then switch. Fiddly. This one gave me a full ten minutes of flats to get ready for the harder work ahead.
I should say that I think my setup was somehow wrong today. Even though I have MyWhoosh set to 100% realism, and I was working up a sweat, I didn’t need to switch to gears much at all, and never used the little ring. For a climb with some 8 percent corners, I was able to ‘comfortably’ hold 95rpm for a lot of this, implying things weren’t particularly realistic.
The Alto del Aguila route tended to suite me. I didn’t do particularly well on it, with a fairly low average wattage even though I was trying. Hard.
But I liked the fact it was straight up. No flats, nothing to screw up the rhythm.
Without knowing the route I was hoping for some visual excitement to stave off any ill feelings on the ascent. I don’t want to say boredom because I’m rarely bored on a climb. The thoughts of giving up, or at least easing off are far more prevalent.
And in parts MyWhoosh is far more interesting than Zwift. I’d say less so on this climb, but the town areas for sure are far more realistic and visually interesting. I did notice a bunch of graphics repeating frequently, mostly the vivid murals and a few pedestrians kept popping back up. One looked very pasty and was easy to spot as he appeared every kilometre or so.
However with Zwift’s recent climb portal changes, it really does make me miss two things in particular compared to this ride. One is that I could only see a bit of the gradient on the HUD in order to know where I was, and what lay ahead. With no prior route knowledge I was basically peddling blind. Even the start and end of the segment is unmarked, or it was as best I could tell you in hindsight. I thought I’d finished when the hill levelled off, but it turned out the route continued for a couple more kilometres after that.
The second obvious thing missing from MyWhoosh, still, is real people. Heck, I didn’t even see any bots today. The bots were out there, and before the ride I did see a group ride was starting elsewhere. Not sure how many real people were on that, as it didn’t give numbers and I didn’t go in to see.
But yeah, one of the big motivating factors on last week’s climb portal was trying to keep up with another Zwifter en route. Without those markers it’s so much easier to ease off or not push quite as hard as I otherwise might.
The last sort of downer today was that when the climb did end, I was really quite ready to enjoy the descent. I know I say the climb portal descents are dull, but I feel like I’ve earned the easy stuff for a while regardless. What goes up must come down, etc.
Not so on this route.
I kept pedalling thinking it would join back on the loop and send me down, but no. In the end I gave up when it tried to send me on another big looking climb. Honestly it felt like being inside an Escher painting. No fair.
There are some other changes to MyWhoosh that I noticed since last time. Microphones to talk was a big one I’m sure wasn’t there before. Not sure how I feel about voice chatting with a bunch of sweaty men in bib shorts dotted around the world, but then I don’t have a microphone and as already mentioned, no one was online anyway.
A very cool thing that beats Zwift was the actions, such as thumbs up, wave, and elbow flick (all in Zwift), and then fist pump, peace, and dab. Really cool ways to “show off” after winning a race, taking a KOM, or something like that. I thought that was really cool.
The other thing was segment ghosts, or virtual bots to race yourself. Again, I’m not sure this wasn’t there last time, but I don’t remember it. It’s nice to have, but I couldn’t have used it today as being my first time up the Alto Del Aguila, I don’t have a previous attempt to compete against.
I must say though, I’m shattered. Absolutely knackered. It really took it out of me. I don’t feel like I did that well. Certainly not like I emptied the tank and gave it my all. But my body feels like I did. I’m so tired I’ve basically lazed the day away ever since. Hopefully a good night’s sleep will do me right and then tomorrow I’m thinking recovery walk.
Anyway, enjoyable if rather solitary. More people ought to check it out. It’s basically Zwift, only single player. And free.
