Hi all, I’ve been doing a lot of cycling training/workouts the last years and have struggled to do the same quality training outdoors than indoors. Because it’s just hard to really execute workouts outdoor due to traffic etc. Especially since I don’t feel like doing the same roads every time.
So I’ve been planning to build a site where you can plot your intervals/workouts on specific sections of a route. So that you’re not triggered to do a vo2max effort whilst you’re in a crowded area or for example on a descent. And similarly that you can do your 10m tempo effort on this nice uninterrupted stretch of tarmac!
I’ve been talking to Garmin and unfortunately there is no way to have workout steps triggered by gps location. So the best we can do is distance-based. For for that to work the user needs to start recording the ride at the exact start of the route for it to be in sync. Also, he cannot deviate from the planned route.
This has obvious drawbacks. If the user records before or after the start of the route or if there are roadworks then the workout steps are triggered at the wrong place.
So I’m doubting whether to pursue this or not.
What are the thoughts of this community. Do you like the idea and would you be ok with the drawbacks? Perhaps some ideas to overcome it?
ps. to the mods, if you find this post inappropriate, feel free to remove. Just figured that more people here are struggling with doing intervals outside.
I don’t know if Wahoo would be different. But if it is put to the right person there that “hey look, this might be something that gives you something Garmin hasn’t got” then who knows?
We’ve had a few chats with developer support of connect iq and their conclusion was that it could not be done as a true workout cause the workout function is pretty isolated. What would be possible via connect iq is to create something that will give power instructions at specific gps points but that would not trigger workout steps or even intervals/laps.
Now two things to note: we (developers) only studied their very basic dev docs. And the dev support we got was well, rather mediocre in terms of knowledge.
Well you’d build your own iq connection to your website as you’d need to download a workout with interval steps defined by gps location. Iq apps can have web connectivity, and use device storage to enable that.
Think this would be more useful as a map with a search function. “Show me all stretches of road where I can ride 10 mins at x speed uninterrupted”, or “show me a climb that will take me 5 minutes”. Then let me create route to those places. The startpoints could then just trigger a “you are at your segment now” message on your computer. You could then just remember what you were going to do there (such as 5 reps if the hill at threshold), or perhaps start a workout there. Linking it up into a complete route seems unrealistic - you might need to change something about your ride there, and you wouldn’t want to need to go back to the start to do it again! Part of the nice thing about outdoor training is that you can combine a normal ride with some intervals. I wouldn’t want to have the ckmputer dictate the normal ride part of it.