Ride a Strava Route in Rouvy

THIS DOES NOT WORK ANYMORE. PLEASE READ NO EDITOR NO PROBLEM FOR AN UPDATED GUIDE.

Training and racing in Rouvy is great. Especially, if you ride on an AR route. So you can enjoy the nice scenery of some village in Italy while pedaling your lungs out. Buts sometimes you just want to get into your hardcore training mode and just do what is necessary to do. Ride a certain route, keep track of your numbers and beat your personal best. The beautiful thing of Rouvy is that you can pretty easy import any route you want. In this article I will show you two options:

Create a Route based on an Outdoor Activity

This option is great if you have ridden a route in real life and want to use Rouvy to use it for training to use it for training. Maybe you take part in a race every year and want to train the route.

So you go to your last recorded ride of this route in Strava, click on the three dots on the left-hand side and select "Export Original". You will then be prompted to download a fit-file.

We now import this fit-file as an activity in Rouvy. You can find the page under Training, Activity Import. This will take a while, depending on your activity.

After the upload is finished you can visit the activity and create a new route based on it. Nice!

Create any Route

Sometimes you do not have done an activity on your desired route. Maybe you train for a certain event or what to compare yourself to others, which live far away. Maybe you moved and want to ride your home-route again. This is also possible with Rouvy- even though it takes a little more effort to do so.

First we need a nice GPX file, which contains the route data. Since Strava is the go-to platform for most cyclist and runners out there and therefore will likely already have your desired route, we use it to obtain the GPX-file.

For example, we want this nice Island-Round in Rouvy. First we need to export the GPX file. Therefore, we click on the "GPX export"-button in the top-right-hand corner of the map.

Then we need to download and install the Rouvy Route Editor, which is only available for Windows. We then start the VirtualTraining Editor - this is what the shortcut is called - and log in which our Rouvy credentials. Afterwards we click on "Route Editor" and "Import GPS Data". We do a quick sanity check by looking at the map, give the route a name and assign a sport.

Then we click on "Save Route", click on "Exit Route Editor" and say "Yes" to uploading the route. The route location search did not work for me, therefore we just enter the information manually. We confirm the upload. Now we have to wait a little for an email, which confirms finished processing of our new route.

Now we can ride the route.

Summary

We saw two approaches to import routes, which we want to train on, to Rouvy. In both cases we will not see a video, but we see our icon riding on the map view, feel the real gradients and prepare ourselves for the real deal.

Did you already import a custom route into Rouvy? Feel free to leave a link to the route in the comments. Maybe we can start a weekly or monthly challenge with rotating routes.

But the most important thing: Stay healthy and keep on cycling.