While Zwift has dominated the news of indoor training recently, there are other players who have been at work on their offerings, and Kinomap has a suite of new video-driven features. For those of you considering riding inside this winter, you might want to check out Kinomap’s L’Etape du Tour Indoor Challenge, Kinomap.TV or the company’s new gameplay.
Kinomap has a whopping 93,033km worth of rider-perspective videos on its site. Subscribers can search by region, popularity or type, and ride with their trainers driving the motion. Since the videos are user-uploaded, some are great and others are less so, but they all give you the viewpoint of being on a bike and riding up the road.
L’Etape du Tour is the enormous sportive put on by Tour de France organizer ASO on the course of a Tour stage. For 2016, L’Etape did the stage from Megève to Morzine — and more than 15,000 riders participated. If you weren’t one of them, you can ride and even race it indoors on the three major climbs broken out by Kinomap:
- Col des Aravis, 6.7km with a 7% incline
- Col de la Colombière, 11.7 km with a 5.8% incline
- Col de Joux Plane, 11.6km with a 8.5% incline
Registration is open now and the challenge begins on October 24 and runs for three weeks, giving time to the participants to climb the three cols.
Another type of indoor training, Kinomap.TV is based on Web Bluetooth. Riders with either a smart trainer, a speed sensor or a power meter can plug into suggested YouTube playlists via a Google account. Riders can then watch popular rides live or in replay mode, or any YouTube video, with Kinomap.TV providing a simple motivation: you have to pedal for the video to play. If you stop pedaling, the video pauses.
Finally, Kinomap updated its app with some new gaming features. You can watch videos at original speed, or drive them faster by pedaling faster.
You can see more about all these new offerings at kinomap.com
