Transcontinental Race No. 7 - TCR7 - #TCRN07 - 2019

When I was dotwatching, Rory asked me to look at a few question marks like that at the end, where they weren't sure exactly where a rider had been. First thing that I did was to follow them on Strava so I could see their tracks and get a more detailed view. If they weren't on Strava, you just kind of piece it together looking at the distance that they have travelled between tracker points, whether the implied average speed makes sense for the road, etc. Generally you can work out what has happened if you have a good look at it!

CP2 parcours has been shortened.

No change on Komoot yet. Have you seen the details somewhere else?

It's pretty direct so I can't see what else they can do apart from cut out the detour up to the ski station.

My guess is the hotel that the checkpoint is in has pulled out or something to similar effect.

No change on Komoot yet.

Yes there is.
It's subtle.
Maybe all that riding by my feeble dynamo light has made my eyesight better...

I read roadworks on the parcours. The Control is the same.

Ok, I didn't look too closely at the route but it still says updated in April so i assumed no change yet. But maybe that feature of komoot is broken. look again.

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Do you know what size screwdriver will open the tracker? What I had last year was too large.

My tracker arrived yesterday, spot gen 3. You don't need a screwdriver as it has wire loops on the screws so can undo by hand

Damn! I think they had screws last year. I will have both a screwdriver and an Allen key so should be fine.

Interesting. Looked at it now. They have chopped the last bit off, on the road to Vranjska Banja. Roadworks there...?

Is it a new thing to have a checkpoint that is not on the parcours? Or a parcours that doesn't go to the checkpoint? In 2016 they didn't have that, the parcours either started from or finished at the checkpoint.

You don't know what version you will get.

Okay, I see. Strange it still says updated in April.

Last year the Slovenian checkpoint was not on the parcours either.

Would be mega lolz if they moved a checkpoint in the briefing.
Imagine the meltdowns

Also going off the Brompton guy...

Sometimes the CP is on the parcours, sometimes near it.

Wonder how many people haven't looked at their GPS points and failed to route to the CPs?

No different to getting to a road that's not actually there (done that), no longer allows cars (done that), unrideable sand/gravel (done that), fenced off (done that) and having to re-route around it on the fly. Online mapping is definitely not perfect.

Of course but the reaction to a change on FB shows how it’d go down.

For sure. I didn't say I didn't have a fucking meltdown every time I had to re-route :)

Last year I ran into trouble when I was trying to route on an access road alongside a main through route, which ended up crossing a couple of fields of cabbages. All trying to avoid about 100m of road which was banned to bikes!

Yeah, I've had lots of little re-routes for that kind of thing. Hungary was pretty bad with its bike bans on roads. Often there'd be a path but then it'd be ripped up because of construction so you'd have to go around. Had similar issue in Italy I think on a path that kind of stopped and I couldn't work out how to get across a major road, cue lots of back and forth. Even in innocuous places like a little town in France I remember looping the town about three times because I couldn't work out how to exit it! Oh and the fucking RAB last year where every exit seemed to be a motorway. In the end I looked at the tracker and followed skinny's route for about 200k - there were only about 3 turns in that whole time but I'd wasted like an hour riding every exit trying to work out what wasn't banned. Think that was Hungary too. So fucking annoying. I think I had a hotel booked that night and it took twice as long as expected to get there so I didn't arrive until 6am or some shit and then left late. At least no Hungary this year.

So when you guys need to reroute on the fly, what are you using? and are you getting valuable information from it? Road surface, foot path, swamp land, cabbage field, etc.
This is exactly the use case where I find OSMAND is just awesome.
After the learning curve that is, but that applies to everything innit?

I've got OSMAND but I rarely use it. It's normally enough to zoom out on the Garmin and pick another route.

When I have to re-route on the fly I turn my phone on and use OSMAnd, but I just look at the roads, I don't get it to do a route. Essentially I don't trust any app to do routing, I only want map information so I can decide.

Basically, this.

I’ve got wheels!

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