Morning Bike Ride in Germany

Today I went for a beautiful, exhilarating bicycle ride along the Main River from Marktheidenfeld to Lohr in Germany.  I also happened to be sitting on my bike while attached to a stationary training stand in my home in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.  Before I go into more detail about how that was possible, I have to take care of one item of housekeeping.

In an earlier post, I said I'd write more about my hip replacement, so here goes:  Shortly after we moved into our new home in late March, my right hip started to bother me.  It deteriorated rapidly, and by late June I was barely able to walk or do anything else.  It turned out that I needed a complete hip replacement, which I finally had done on 10 September.  My right hip joint is now an artificial implant made of titanium, ceramic, and polyethylene. 

My new hip.  It's astonishing what medical science can do.

Since that time I have been in recovery and physical therapy, working to regain mobility, range of motion, strength, and flexibility.  It's been somewhat challenging and frustrating to have such limitations on my activities, but it was totally worth it.  My hip is 100% pain-free, and unless I stop to think about it, I am completely unaware that there's anything different inside. I have recovered almost completely, and am now back to my old exercise regimen and am working to regain my strength and endurance after several months of forced inactivity.

I've been walking in the neighborhood again, although I have not yet gone on any real hikes out in the mountains (soon!).  I did buy snowshoes last week, so when the snow comes I will be getting into that for the winter.  I had anticipated doing a lot of bicycling over the summer, but as it turned out I was only able to go on three or four rides before I was incapacitated, so I really missed that activity.  I decided that in order to stay in some kind of cycling shape through the inclement months, I would buy a stationary bike trainer.

I did a fair amount of research online trying to select the best trainer for me.  There seem to be basically three major types:  1) Dedicated stationary training bikes, 2) Stationary training stands with an axle and cartridge (gears) that you put your own bike on after removing the rear wheel, and 3) Stationary training stands that you put your own bike on, that work by friction against the rear tire.  There are also various systems of resistance including hydraulic and magnetic, and perhaps others I don't know about.  There is a bewildering array of brands and models, and I was almost overwhelmed by all the choices.

I ended up selecting the Wahoo Kickr Snap, a wheels-on magnetic-resistance trainer that got excellent reviews everywhere I looked.  I chose a wheels-on trainer because I don't have a dedicated space to set it up, so it's in the middle of our downstairs entertainment area.  We generally use the seating down there only when we have company, so it will stay set up most of the time.  But I wanted the ability to quickly detach the bike and put the whole setup away when we want to use the room.

The Wahoo Kickr Snap, set up with my bike in front of the downstairs TV. The app displayed on the TV screen is Zwift.

I bought my bike in Germany in 2016 and most of my recent riding was done while there on that tour of duty.  It's a sort of hybrid bike, unlike what most people here in the USA would consider a "road bike".  It's a sort of commuter bike/gravel bike/could-be-mountain-bike-with-the-right-tires sort of thing.  I rode it to work every day that I could while on that tour, as well as all over the German countryside during my time off.  It's equally comfortable on paved roads and gravel paths. It's not geared for speed, but rather for the versatility to go up and down hills and carry a load if I want to.  I have no interest in actual mountain biking per se, so I think it will be perfect for the kind of riding I intend to do on the roads, bike paths, and gravel Forest Service roads around here.

Setup of the Kickr Snap was pretty straightforward.  I had to replace the skewer in the rear wheel with the one that came with the unit and has the correct shape to interface with the mounting system.  Once everything is adjusted, it has a simple quick-disconnect that allows you to lift the bike out and wheel it away, then fold the unit for storage.  The unit is bluetooth-enabled, and can pair with a computer, TV, or mobile device.  I experimented with different setups, learning how it works and getting started.

The basic mechanism is that the magnetic flywheel both senses the rate at which you are pedaling, and also offers variable resistance according to the workout or ride that you choose.  It communicates via bluetooth with whatever device you are using, so that it can measure your stats, control the resistance, and keep the display updated.  Wahoo has a fitness app that manages workouts, etc, but that wasn't really my interest.  There are also a variety of apps that offer virtual rides that you can watch on the TV or other device, so I looked into those.

The first one I tried was Zwift.  It seems to be the most popular such app, and I have say it's pretty neat.  It is animated, so it has a video game feel to it.  The app places you in a virtual world on a riding course along with other riders, all of whom are real people also using the app at the same time as you.  You can see their names, country flags, and riding stats on the display.  There are also a variety of other stats displayed on the screen, including your speed, elapsed time, distance traveled and distance remaining, and an elevation profile of the ride with an indicator of where you are.  As you head down hill, resistance decreases, and as you head uphill, resistance increases.  I found it very interesting to have to shift gears to keep up my cadence and progress along with the program.

As you ride, other riders pass you by, and if you work hard enough, you can bypass other riders.  As you get close behind someone, the app will encourage you to "close the distance", and you get credit for successfully drafting other riders if you stay in the right zone for awhile.  If you stop pedaling and come to a stop, your virtual rider stops on screen and waits for you to start again. I found Zwift to be interesting and challenging, even without the accessory that Wahoo sells that moves your front fork up and down to correspond to changes in slope.  

I can see how Zwift is popular with people who like to race and ride with other people.  But I am more of a solitary rider.  I enjoy riding by myself through the countryside, so I was more interested in taking virtual rides through real places on video, something I had read about but never experienced.  

This morning I tried a different app called FulGaz.  It is relatively new (I think it was released about a year ago) and offers just the sort of experience I was looking for.  Its rides consist of Go-Pro type footage of real rides that people have taken, which the company then processes into virtual rides much like the animated rides on Zwift.  You can select from a large catalog of rides, including a number of familiar courses and a lot of places I'd never heard of.  The rides are categorized by difficulty, and you can sort by distance, difficulty, type of ride, or just go through them A-Z to see what looks interesting.  

The ride I chose for this morning was an 11(+) mile ride from Marktheidenfeld to Lohr, along the Main River in Germany.  I have spent a lot of time up and down the entire length of the Main River valley both on and off duty, and really looked forward to seeing how it felt as a virtual ride. This was one of the easiest rides in the catalog, with a total elevation change remaining within a 60 meter range for the entire ride.  

My first attempt ended after a few minutes due to low-quality video.  There are several options for how to set up the technical side of things, including streaming to a device (e.g. iPad or iPhone), downloading the ride to the device, screen mirroring that device's display to a TV (I used AppleTV), streaming directly to the app on AppleTV, or downloading the ride to the AppleTV device and then running it locally.  I had run Zwift on my iPad and screen mirrored to the AppleTV, and that really zapped the iPad battery.  So this time I tried streaming to the app on the AppleTV directly.  I quickly found that my internet service is not fast enough to stream the live high-quality video (although we stream high definition movies all the time). So I downloaded the ride to the AppleTV device and tried again.  I didn't know the capacity of the AppleTV device, so I chose the lowest resolution (the choices were 4k (6.56 GB), 1080p (1.56 GB), and 720p (795MB)).   

The display offers much the same information as Zwift - speed, wattage (how much you're generating on the device, I think, although it might be an expression of the magnetic resistance), calories burned, elapsed time, distance traveled and distance remaining, an elevation profile of the ride with a progress dot for your position, and a diagram showing the current slope expressed as a %.  There are, however, no other in-app riders visible - you're riding on your own. 

This is a photo of the screen taken during my ride.  The simulated ride displays are superimposed over the GoPro video.  The "Erlach Sprint" box appears partway through the ride, displays its own statistics, and then disappears.  It apparently represents only a certain segment of the ride.  The rider in front of me is the one I will never catch!

Even at low resolution, the ride was spectacular.  FulGaz offers a variety of settings, amongst which are "Steady" where the ride video simply plays in front of you at the speed it was originally recorded, and "Reactive", where the video speeds up and slows down along with your pedaling speed.  I chose reactive mode, as it seemed like it would be more natural.  I was right, to a degree.  The scenery goes by according to how fast you are pedaling, and the resistance changes according to whether you're going up or downhill (although for this easy ride, this effect was minimal and I stayed in the highest gears most of the time).  But the moving objects in the video always move the same way, because that is where they were when the video was shot.  What this means is that as you speed up or slow down, so do the other cyclists, cars, and pedestrians in the video.  It also means that they stay in the same relative position to you as they were to the original cyclist who shot the video.  So that cyclist who passed me halfway through the ride will always be in front of me, gradually receding into the distance.  No matter how good a shape I get myself in nor how hard I try, I will never catch him!

I also noticed that there was a very slight discrepancy between the elevation profile, the felt resistance, and the appearance of uphill or downhill slopes on the video. I don't know if these are inherent time lags or if there are settings I can adjust to fine-tune the app to my equipment setup - still more to learn.  There were also a few times when the video got a little grainy, but I think that will be alleviated when I download the higher-resolution version (I want to be able to read the signs, anyway!)

But these are all minor criticisms.  The overall experience was delightful.  After just a couple of minutes, I was totally immersed in a ride through Germany.  My mind alternated between simply observing the video and enjoying the ride, and flashing back to the many, many memorable rides I took through the German countryside when I actually lived there.  I found myself wishing that I had GoPro footage of some of those rides, so that I could submit them as candidates for FulGaz rides.  I think I am very likely to do this for the Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes next summer, if someone else hasn't done it first by the time I get there.

This ride took me about 40 minutes, and although there was a time just after the halfway point when I wondered if I'd make it, I hung in there and for the most part, I was much less conscious of the work I was doing than I was of the virtual experience of riding in Germany.  I am in no kind of cycling shape, and my legs felt a bit rubbery when I was finished, but I was sad to see the ride end.

FulGaz allows you to save and upload your ride, as well as to designate favorites.  I did both, and also linked it to Strava, a popular riding app that can track both real and virtual rides:

This is the first ride I've put into Strava in a very long time.  Looking forward to adding many more!

I'm still learning about the finer points of how to organize all this, but I am 100% convinced that I will be subscribing to FulGaz, and that I'll be enjoying a dizzying variety of virtual rides in various places around the world, all the while remaining cozy and warm in our home through the winter months here in Idaho.

Mood:  Happy

Music: Nena, Ich Bin Hyperaktiv