Passo dello Stelvio – RGT Cycling

As decided in the previous week’s review I am aiming to complete one proper climb per week from now on.

With that in mind, I decided mid-week that I’d most likely tackle RGT Cycling’s Passo dello Stelvio, a 14.1km route covering 1114m of climb at an average gradient of 8%.

This is roughly equivalent to Alpe Du Zwift.

This route is pretty much intense from the off.

There’s a very (very) brief piece of road that’s down hill and then boosh, into the climbing we go.

And that climbing doesn’t stop for the next 14km.

I’d forgotten just how intense over an hour of uninterrupted climbing can be.

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Much like Alpe Du Zwift, the corners on Passo dello Stelvio are numbered. I didn’t realise this for quite some time, so am unsure exactly what the numbering starts at. But if I had to guess, there’s maybe between 40 and 50 corners here.

Unlike Alpe Du Zwift, there really isn’t that much to see on this route. It’s a generally nice looking thing, but gets a bit same-y.

There’s the road surface, a few signs, a couple of things along side the road (barrier, bricks, posts), a small selection of repeated tree shapes, and the mountains in the background.

I’d have really appreciated if the textures overall were a little more varied. The road texture repeats every few seconds. The trees look good (better than Zwift’s, imho), but much of the other road side stuff is repetitive.

I guess we are spoiled by the game-y graphics on Alpe Du Zwift.

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One thing that I really did like about this route is that it felt very “real world”. I didn’t appreciate this initially, but as the route progressed, meandering (slowly) through the mountains, stuff off in the distance became more and more part of the route.

I’ve probably not explained that very well, so let me give an example:

In a typical modern AAA game (GTA V for example), if you can see it, you can go there. That feels quite liberating.

In Zwift, you often cannot see things in any great detail unless that part of the map has loaded. There are a few small exceptions to this – the Radio Tower is visible from other routes in Watopia, but the Alpe Du Zwift is very much just a large white blob.

In this route, about half way through, I could see the finish line off in the distance.

I didn’t get this at first, but slowly, the bright orange Strava arch became more and more visible. Very cool.

All of the climb portion of this ride was spent in the little ring at the front.

This was a solid climb. The steepest gradients I saw were (thankfully very) briefly 20%+.

Each corner / switchback was the steepest part of the route, and gear shifting was mandatory.

In hindsight, I really should have had a warm up prior to hitting this route. A 10km easy pedalling on a flat route would have meant a much more fluid start.

As it was, I went a little too hard “out of the gate”.

I covered the first 3km above FTP, and managed to get through this section in ~15 minutes, or 1km per 5 minutes approx.

Some mental arithmetic after this point seriously killed my motivation.

Things might be a little more interesting on rides like this with more riders around.

As it was I saw 4 other riders during my near 2 hour activity. This isn’t great. I mean, there’s no real gain from the social aspect, but it sure is nice to be around other people suffering similarly.

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Approaching a third of the journey up the pass, I saw the only significant landmark of the journey.

I can imagine in real life many a cyclist jumping off here and having one for the road. I could easily understand their mentality. However, I don’t think I’d get back on if I stopped.

There were times I considered giving up on this one. It was a total slog, and it took a concerted effort, at some points, to keep the pedals turning.

I really tried hard in the first 20 minutes though. Maybe a little too hard. It was only after about 11 minutes that I remembered that RGT Cycling doesn’t have anything like the metrics that Zwift does, so calculating how close I came to improving my FTP would be impossible. Such a shame.

Without a doubt, the first half of this ride was the most challenging.

I’m not sure if that’s because the initial several 10’s of corners were steeper on average, or whether it was just a mental thing of not yet being over half way done.

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Once I crossed the 7km mark and saw the remaining KM counter being less than what I had covered, mentally at least, things got easier.

Typically on climbs like this, there comes a time where a certain gradient starts to feel flat.

For this ride, that was around 8%.

At no point, as best I recall, did I find myself less than 4 gears down from the top of the rear ring. Apologies for my lack of technical terminology here.

Even at this “easy” gearing, I couldn’t get close to 85rpm. I was solidly in the 70’s for most of this ride.

With about 6km to go, the first realisations of what lay ahead were visible to me.

I really liked this.

Off in the far distance I could make out two bright orange squares. One above the other.

And boy, did they look high up.

Welp, that’s where we were heading.

And that’s where I think this ride differed to Alpe Du Zwift. Yes, there was a lot of work still ahead. But being able to see the finish line was helpful, in some small way.

I’m honestly unsure if this was simply my perception, or whether this was the case:

Things felt easier after about two thirds of the climb.

Possibly the average gradient got slightly flatter here. There seemed to be more, and longer 5-8% sections. I admit I was much closer to 175w here than the 190w average I’d been trying to keep for the earlier part of the ride.

On the plus side, I was feeling tired, but like I could see this one through.

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At some point, the mountain textures resolved into a much higher resolution. This was really cool and made the whole thing look 10x better.

Frankly I wish they had an option to ramp up the detail all the time. I’d like the choice of running at, say, 30fps with great graphics, than 60fps and it looking like Quake 1.

I used another tactic during this ride:

Once I had another rider behind me, I started trying my best to increase the distance between me and him. Progress here was slow, but it was enough to keep my mind off the process of cranking the pedals over and over.

In the final third of the route, things got more interesting.

With the approaching first Strava Arch, I was awaiting something to change on the ride.

Again, this was enough to keep me motivated in continuing. It is good to have something to aim for. I think Zwift nails this with the timed corner segments on Alpe Du Zwift.

As I approached the arch, I was made aware this would be the “Switchback” segment.

As I’ve seen before on RGT Cycling, one of the coolest things about the routes is the leaderboards / timed sections.

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Again, this is similar to Zwift, but imo, slightly better. I like the All Time leaderboard concept. However, in this case I think the top spot went to someone riding a motorbike. 3 minutes? Come on now.

By the time I got to the timed section I was frankly bushed. Ready to get the whole thing done. At least knowing the top 10 finisher did it in 5 minutes gave me some indication of how much longer I’d be on the climb. My guess was somewhere between 5-10 minutes.

What’s not evident from some of these screenshots, sadly, is the aspect of looking back over where I’d come from.

The higher I got on the Switchbacks, the better the view over the sprawling roads below.

Also during this timed section, there was simply more to see. The signage, the rocks, the better textures on the mountains. This part just felt graphically superior to the rest of the route.

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Combining the timed segment, the changing visuals, the “things” to look at in the distance (the roads where I’d come from), and the corner markers now in low single digits, I definitely found this part of the climb the easiest.

However, I wasn’t putting out a particular sterling number of watts.

I’d be really interested to try one of the true Video routes and see how it compares to riding something like this. I’m guessing I’m stuck to one camera angle in that case, but the visuals are a big thing for me.

Turning the final corner I made perhaps my biggest mistake of the ride.

As I got really close to the arch, I went a little too hard. 600w or so. But in the same “easy” gearing.

And after I’ve felt like I’ve hurt my knee. Stupid, stupid me.

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Fun times, 9 minutes 15, good enough for 2nd overall. Out of 3. Lels.

Fun time RGT Cycling thing, the arch is seemingly not always the end of the climb.

I covered this in my review.

I’m sure this isn’t the case in real life, is it? Surely the arch always marks the end of the climb? Otherwise… what’s the point?

Anyway, there was only 300m or so of distance (not climb) remaining after the arch so I was soon at the end. And thank God.

There were a few buildings to be seen at the top, and a little road marker. But I couldn’t get close. I was automagically turned around and sent back down on the descent.

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During the descent I dropped into the hardest gearing, front and back, and welcomed the ease and speed.

Along the way I saw the rider who had been behind me throughout, and made sure to give them a friendly wave. However, RGT Cycling wave emote kinda looks like I’m giving the V’s. Poor guy.

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I pedalled all the way back down. Partly to clock up the extra KM’s on the week’s total, and partly because it was literally all down hill and I deserved it.

As mentioned already, there’s really nothing more to see at the end of the ride. And that’s a shame. I’d have loved to have seen some extra stats.

Like my last ride for whatever reason, my stats didn’t automatically upload to Strava.

For this I needed to email the stats from the app to my computer, then upload them to Strava, then download them from Strava, and upload into Training Peaks. Kinda messy.

But overall the ride was solid enough. I only saw a few visual bugs, and thankfully experienced no riding bugs or problems. Things felt very solid.

Overall this was a great ride.

I’m a little disappointed not to have broken through 1000 calories.

I’m happy with how my heart rate settled around 170bpm for the majority of the climb. For me, that’s a dramatic improvement over the 180 average I was at a while ago.

This was a great workout. There’s another, easier climb (Mont Ventoux, I think it’s called) in RGT Cycling still to hit. But I think next time I’d do Alpe Du Zwift.