Rouvy Rouvy Rouvy Rouvy, – Do ya, do ya, do ya, do ya?

Was expecting to go on Zwift initially, but TT came with 30-day free Rouvy trial (on top of standard 14), so thought I’d give it a go first.

Quite enjoying the scenic rides in the Alps and power metrics are showing some improvements 2 weeks in, so may well stick with it.

Anyone else on there? How are you getting on?

They’re doing a virtual Tour de Suisse next week with some of the Velon teams which looks like it could be quite interesting and should be good publicity for them

I’ve been a user for 3 or 4 years and love it.

I like the fact they’re always trying to improve it. New routes being added all the time and the AR feature being introduced a while back.

Lots of UK routes too which is great. The Swiss routes are some of the best on there too.

The challenges and the career feature keep things interesting.

I just pay for a year at a time and definitely get value for money out of it.

One feature is adding your own route. I gopro’d my commute,uploaded it and my work colleague tried to beat me….lol way too much time on our hands.

(He didn’t beat me heh heh)

I’m halfway through the Tour de Suisse challenge, there’s a 1144m climb to look forward to in the morning.

How much is it for a year please chaps?

Think it’s about 100 quid for premium membership.

Thanks, that’s not too bad.

https://rouvy.com/en/pricing

They also have a family sharing feature which allows you to have multiple users under a single subscription. Probably ripe for abuse as per my wife’s sister’s Netflix login.

It’s all very tempting!

Why not try the free trial?

I like Rouvy AR but it doesn’t seem to actually work all that well on my (admittedly not great) laptop. The video stops while my guy disappears up the road and it struggles to catch up. I don’t mind if it does it once every now and again but when it gets too frequent it really spoils it for me.

Started my FulGaz trial this week, looks pretty similar to Rouvy in that is uses videos of real roads although there appear to be more than Rouvy, did the Lagos de Covadonga climb which was decent.

Some strange stuff going on though, even though the gradient was reading 10% and the video was clearly showing it was constant uphill there were bits where the trainer resistance just dropped out for 4-5 seconds leaving me spinning my smallest gear at 120rpm trying to keep going. Not sure if it was the settings I had or not.

mrb123, probably will when I get a smart trainer, just pondering getting one as I’ve just mentioned in another thread I just started.
Does look good.

Can you ride with another person on Rouvy?

Can you ride with another person on Rouvy?

Yes there’s an option to set up races and invite “friends”, or just have open races that anyone can join.

Anyone else watching the Swiss Digital 5 on iplayer?

Just noticed that Nino Schurter is having a go.

I lost interest in zwift. Is this any better?

If you’ve already got a smart trainer ( or equivalent), you can get a free trial and decide for yourself.

(I haven’t tried Zwift so can’t give you a comparative opinion)

I’ve just watched stage 2 of the digital tour de suisse thing – I didn’t realise Rouvy doesn’t have any drafting physics so regardless of group size etc it’s effectively an individual time trial.

I rode up Passo Sella with a mate, it was good. Chatted on the phone.. well.. at first, then I stopped chatting towards the end… I reckon it’s not as good as Zwift for ‘social media’ type riding, but personally I much prefer watching actual scenery scroll by. There are only four locations in Zwift and you only get a choice of two at any one time. Riding around London for an hour gets pretty dull. Rouvy on the other hand has tens of thousands of real climbs and rides videoed all over the world.

You can ride with up to four people if the course is AR enabled, the only issue is that only a fraction of the rides are AR enabled.

Next time I’m trying BKool because it has similar real world rides but also has a velodrome in which I intend to kick my mate’s skinny arse.

Rouvy drafting update:

I took part in a beta test of the new drafting feature yesterday. It seemed to do the trick. Felt the loss of tow once I’d been dropped at the front. Then managed to latch on to a few riders in the mid-field and got a decent reduction in resistance. Also returned the favour a few times to avoid being a complete wheelsucker! Finished with a decent “who goes first” battle with another rider at the end, which felt quite realistic.
To give a balanced review: drafting was activated as you passed stationary riders. Also it was quite easy to get barged out of the slipstream by riders coming from behind, when already riding two-abreast. Hopefully they’ll be able to iron out these issues.

On the whole it gave a different dimension to the race, and stopped it feeling like a time-trial effort.

Old thread resurrection!

How are people still finding Rouvy?

I think I might prefer this sort of thing to Zwift.

Are there enough people to be able to join events, or do most people use it as a solo ride thing?

And does it have any videos in Yorkshire?

To answer the last point, yes, loads in Yorkshire. Various sections of the Etape du Dales for starters.

Well I liked it at first but I ended up finding mates and racing and that is all a far greater draw for me than just watching scenery, so I’m Zwift only. Or I was; packed the trainer away for the summer.

Can you use it for workouts?

I don’t really care about interactivity or racing but enjoy using the GCN videos for workouts. Problem is GCN don’t di the exact workouts I want so being able to overlay a workout over some nice climb footage might be a good compromise…

Just switched over from Zwift and liking it so far as I was getting a bit bored with the Zwift routes. I use a laptop hooked up to a TV but always download the route in HD ahead of riding to get the best resolution. One benefit over zwift is you can have family members linked to the primary account.

I would be interested in trying Rouvy but only have a 2 mbs download broadband. Is that going to be enough or just too slow to be worth the effort?

@welshfarmer I downloaded a 21 mile route in HD which was 4.8GB so that should take around 5 1/2 hours at 2Mbit.

Cheers @shinton . Ouch! I have just downloaded a program this morning that was 1 GB and it took an hour and a bit so your estimate sounds about right. Sounds like it would need planning and let the downloads run overnight. Guessing the actual bandwidth needed for running the actual VR stuff is then relatively low?

I reckon so. It will be a bit of a pain building up your library of rides but once you’ve got them you can go back and ride them again without downloading.

You can get a 14 day free trial, possibly 30 so give it a go.

To echo the thread title:

Omicron I can’t believe it – I’m gonna have to train at home.

Is there anything similar that works with a ‘dumb’ trainer – overlays nice pictures of riding with effort/resistance instructions?

Depending on your trainer – Zwift and probably the others will work fine if you have a speed sensor. It does an estimated power based on the speed (and model of trainer). Some info here: Zwift-specific – other systems will have similar.

Will be fine for making training a bit more interesting. I don’t think you can enter races etc without a power meter.

After a 1 year hiatus I’m back on it, (turbo trainer broke under warranty last January, but spare parts didn’t arrive until the summer when I had no incentive to ride indoors). Since getting round to fixing it on Boxing day, I’ve manged to up my training miles dramatically! Now using a Garmin 530 to record training effort at the same time, and it’s showing some significant gains including +4 on my VO2 max in the last month. It’s certainly made a noticeable difference to my climbing performance in the real world as well.

Any interest out there for a regular “STW” Rouvy race like the Zwifters have been doing?

One way to find out: I’ll set one up and post a link on here.

I love Rouvy and use it, but does feel like it’s popularity is declining, many events have very few riders and the app isn’t the best

I still find it fairly enjoyable, but I wish they would save their updates and bug fixes for a monthly update rather than every damn time I get changed and head out to the garage, then have to stand there for an age while it reinstalls itself.

Shall we try Wednesday at 17:30 BST.

Route: La Vuelta 2022 | Stage 17 – Cabeza la Vaca

23.91 km, 484m ascent

Link to the enter the event:

https://my.rouvy.com/onlinerace/live/118508

The weather looks grim on Saturday morning, so who’s up for tackling the Grossglockner with me?

9am GMT

https://my.rouvy.com/onlinerace/live/136465

Rouvy have got a Black Friday discount, 25% off annual subscriptions. Works out about £88 for the year.

https://support.rouvy.com/hc/en-us/articles/20161201079825-Black-Friday-Offer