TrainingPeaks Virtual Massively Expands with New GPXplore Feature

TrainingPeaks Virtual has expanded with a major new feature that lets you import in a GPX route and ride virtually any route/road/path on the planet. As long as you have a route you’ve already ridden, or create a GPX route from any number of major platforms (Strava, Garmin, Komoot, etc…), then you’re good to go! The feature, as the title implies, is called GPXplore.

This feature lets you ride the route elevation and curves, while also attempting to blend some of the satellite imagery as a basemap which TrainingPeaks Virtual will then blend with 3D graphics to simulate the gist of the landscape around you. Give or take an extra snow-capped mountain. Still, the key thing here is enabling TrainingPeaks athletes and coaches to easily get ridable routes into an indoor training platform that connects with their smart trainers to simulate. That’s the core goal, and that’s achieved here.

After a few harder days of running, I had an easy trainer ride scheduled for today, thus perfect to give this a whirl. So let’s dive into it.

Getting a Route In:

While this part isn’t hard, it’s also a little bit messy (at least at scale). You’ll need to first create the route somewhere else (e.g., on some other platform), before importing it into your TrainingPeaks account. You’ll need a GPX file, so that can be from an existing route you’ve ridden (e.g., exported from Garmin Connect, or Wahoo, Hammerhead, etc…), or a route you’ve created (e.g., Strava, Komoot, etc…). It doesn’t really matter a ton where you create the route, as long as it’s created and you’ve got a file.

In an ideal world, TrainingPeaks would just be able to be a destination for routes from Strava, Komoot, etc… but there’s all assortment of business complexities there (mostly on the part of the others), making this more cumbersome than it needs to be.

Once you’ve got a file, you’ll need to import the file into TrainingPeaks (the website, not the TrainingPeaks Virtual app). This piece is honestly a little bit clunky compared to just importing it into the app, but such is life. Log in, and on the left side you’ll see routes:

From there, just choose the file you want to import:

It only takes a second, and then it’s imported in. It would be a nice touch if they just auto-filled the title in, based on the GPX file name (currently you have to manually title it).

Next, you’ll open up TrainingPeaks Virtual (the game app), and then navigate to ‘Events’, and from there choose ‘Add New’. First, I’d argue this should just be on the main home dashboard as a thing you can do. Zwift learned this lesson a few years ago with structured workouts and such, to just put the things people want on the homepage (especially newly/just-created things). After all, the entire point of TrainingPeaks buying this platform was for deeper integration. Now that the integration is there, don’t hide it by making people create one-off events. Just make it an easy-button.

Anyways, go and create an event, and then you’ll see the option for ‘My Routes’ at the bottom:

Again, I’d argue that if I select a route name, it should just automatically populate that as the title. I know these sound like little nitpicking things (and they are minor), but it’s all about fast workflow for time-crunched athletes. Minimizing friction. The good thing is that George and the TPV crew are incredibly quick at implementing suggestions (by far the fastest in the industry).

Note that if you scroll down, you can select a Biome, which drives the environment around you.

Also, if you scroll down in these settings, there’s options like how many bots are riding with you, requiring a code, etc… I had initally not even noticed there was a scroll bar, let alone all the other options.

In any case, from there it creates an event at a given time, and then you can copy that out to friends. Look, I get it, this feature was based on creating routes for events, rather than the individual athlete. But I’d argue (again) that the whole purpose of TP buying this platform (IndieVelo) was for the individual athlete. I just want to ride the route right now, not schedule it for the future with more clicks. Again, reduce friction, reduce clicks, increase time to ride.

And don’t even get me started on how this event doesn’t show up under my events. I have to enter a code to see my own event that I just created, otherwise this section is just blank. But why?

If I tap on it, I can see the event details, including the route, profile, etc… all of which looks good to me.

Of course, once you tap ‘Let’s Ride’, you need to wait till the start of the event (the soonest you can create it is 5 minutes in advance). I’ve brought up these concerns to TrainingPeaks, and it sounds like they’re already on the case, aiming to simplify/streamline this shortly.

Basically, what I want is:

1) Import GPX into TrainingPeaks (web)
2) Option to tap ‘Ride Now’ on TrainingPeaks Virtual Home Dashboard
3) Instantly start riding the route

Speaking of which, let’s look at how it works once you start riding.

Riding the Route:

With that sorted, you’ll be placed in the starting pen until the event begins. Even on a private event (as mine was, with just me), by deafult you’ll be joined by 29 other simulated riders (bots). You can change this in the settings.

I thought it was mildly interesting to see how TPV overlaid a starting pen loop atop the streets here. You can see the satellite imagery below it, and this is normally a quiet four-way intersection.

In any case, off we went. The route that TPV creates is basically an identical route to your GPX file, from an elevation/gradient/road turn standpoint. What isn’t identical, however, is what surrounds the road, as well as the road surface itself (as I’ll see later). So, for example, here on the quiet street around my home, this is what it looks like in the game vs real life:

As much as I’d love for the mountains to magically surround the island like a James Bond movie (and be snow-capped), that’s definitely not the case either.

Still, the ups/downs of the road are real, which made it fun to fly down a hill at 75KPH that normally has a turn you can’t do above 50KPH for fear of ending up with the sheep.

There do appear to be some bugs to work out with portions of the routes that overlap, these result in fences for riders to…ummm…navigate. This seems to occur any time the route doubles back on itself.

Likewise, there are moments when the cyclists appear to be using non-UCI-compliant bikes, pushing so hard that they simply melt into the pavement.

Still, in terms of the overall ups/downs of a course, it captures it well. Having ridden this route more times than I could possibly count, it does a good job there.

However, the surrounding terrain is mostly incorrect. About the closest it got was one point where I dipped down close to the water on a U-Turn, and it showed the gist of it:

Here’s it in real life:

Still, it’s hard to replicate everything on earth. In many ways, this is akin to RGT’s Magic Roads concept, where you could basically just generate a route based on a GPX file. Which is, in turn, equivalent to what Tacx has had for literally like 15 years (see my review from 2011 of this concept). And there are, of course, countless other small apps that do this too.

Nonetheless, having it in a larger/more mainstream app is beneficial to lots of people, and in the case of TrainingPeaks itself, this is a super common scenario. Many times over the last few years, my wife (who, like me, has been using TP for nearly 20 years) wants to ride a given upcoming race route (e.g., Ironman XYZ or Challenge XYZ), just to understand the general ups/downs. In the past, we’ve either tried to find the route on Rouvy or Fulgaz, or on occasion, messed around with the Tacx app. All of which provide a bit more scenic detail (full videos in the case of Rouvy/Fulgaz), but in many cases you might not really care about the scenery, and you just want the elevation profile. This solves that.

Anyways, cool stuff, and I’m looking forward to seeing the TrainingPeaks Virtual team make some minor tweaks here to streamline this process. Knowing their history in making such tweaks, I suspect it’ll be done by tomorrow at lunch. Maybe even breakfast.

With that – thanks for reading!

FOUND THIS POST USEFUL? SUPPORT THE SITE!

Hopefully, you found this post useful. The website is really a labor of love, so please consider becoming a DC RAINMAKER Supporter. This gets you an ad-free experience, and access to our (mostly) bi-monthly behind-the-scenes video series of “Shed Talkin’”.

Support DCRainMaker - Shop on Amazon

Otherwise, perhaps consider using the below link if shopping on Amazon. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, but your purchases help support this website a lot. It could simply be buying toilet paper, or this pizza oven we use and love.