TCR No9

[StuAff]

Good luck Dave, Phil & everyone else taking part.

[quixoticgeek]

Ooph. Glad I'm not riding this year. Them cobbles are incredibly slippery in the wet.

Good luck all!

[quixoticgeek]

Brutal night. Already quite a few DNF. I hope they are all OK.

J

[quixoticgeek]

Coming up in 26 hours in, first riders are already half way across Switzerland... Seriously impressive riding.

Not quite sure what Christoph Strasser is upto. But he has 0 stopped time!!!

J

[Nuncio]

I see Mikko Mäkipää is ploughing his own lonely farrow again.

[Peat]

Strasser has picked an odd approach to Parcours 1. I reckon the top 3 will all be very close once Strasser has got to the 'start' of it in Roveredo.

EDIT:
Both are about 58km away from the start of the Parcours but Strasser has about 700m of climbing and lots of hairpins while Florian is largely blatting down a straight valley road. I'm also assuming that you're not allowed to ride a bike through the San Bernardino tunnel (?)

[peterc]

Someone I know from outside cycling sent me a link (on dotwatcher.cc) with their cap number so I'm following the race for the first time.

Any advice for a first time dot watcher?

[JonBuoy]

Josh Ibbett is doing some detailed daily updates: https://www.youtube.com/@joshibbett

[Nuncio]

Someone I know from outside cycling sent me a link (on dotwatcher.cc) with their cap number so I'm following the race for the first time.

Any advice for a first time dot watcher?

Dot watching can be fascinating and addictive, but you can't tell from a dot how tired that dot may be or what it is going through (bad weather, illness, injuries, mechanicals, accidents, ennui, euphoria etc). And if a dot hasn't moved for a long time there could be many reasons for that. Dot 44 is not lost - it has an idiosyncratic approach to routing. Oh, and dots are people.

[Pickled Onion]

Interesting to see the stats of the two front runners. Robin has a lower moving avg speed, and has also had twice as much time stopped (6 hours) compared to Christophe (3 hrs). Has his shorter route been tougher, or he's been lucky?

And that amount of sleep is why I'd never consider entering!

[alfapete]

Any advice for a first time dot watcher?

Being a map nerd I like to transpose where my rider is onto Google Maps and then take a Streetview look at it. One of the guys I'm following was stopped on a hillside for a while and I could share the view of the lake with him.

[JonBuoy]

Any advice for a first time dot watcher?

Being a map nerd I like to transpose where my rider is onto Google Maps and then take a Streetview look at it. One of the guys I'm following was stopped on a hillside for a while and I could share the view of the lake with him.

I suggest you look at the rainfall radar for the area!  I don't think that your dot will have had much of a view.

[peterc]

Dot 44 is not lost - it has an idiosyncratic approach to routing.

That Finn with the characteristic approach, he was mentioned in something I read.

Oh, and dots are people.

Yes, I've met mine, they are lovely, though I'm beginning to think more unhinged than I realised at the time.
It's all very impressive (or worrying depending on how you look at it.)

[peterc]

Any advice for a first time dot watcher?

Being a map nerd I like to transpose where my rider is onto Google Maps and then take a Streetview look at it. One of the guys I'm following was stopped on a hillside for a while and I could share the view of the lake with him.

I did something similar, as I watched them earlier, I think I may have got the bug.

[Salvatore]

I see Mikko Mäkipää is ploughing his own lonely farrow again.

FUN FACT: Mäkipää means hilltop.

And here is Mikko on a Mäki called Kaunispää (at solar midnight)

[quixoticgeek]

Mikki, number 44 is the only rider to have ridden and finished every TCR. He's not in it to win, just to finish while having an adventure. He's ridden so much he often picks routes that are new to him rather than maybe being the fastest route. Hence his interesting choices.

And yes. Please remember that dots are people. So it is not the correct pronoun for a dot. The tracker gives you gender. Yellow is no gender recorded so no binary.

If anyone is out and looking not track riders down remember there is a lag between the dot on the map and where the rider is. So anticipate by a few km. Gas stations are great places to wait for riders.

J

[JonBuoy]

This is part of the track that Robin Gemperle used to avoid a load of climbing  :  https://goo.gl/maps/Zs8Ps6YkcBTfvj5e6

It looks worse on his Instagram page.  It is buried somewhere in here but you may need a log in: https://www.instagram.com/stories/robingemperle/3154962130545936592/

[morbihan]

Glad to see the two YACF riders still trucking along. One on the second parcour.
Well done fellas. Now put the phone down and get on with it

[JonBuoy]

If anyone else is getting frustrated by the official FollowMyChallenge tracker killing their computer these two unofficial trackers might help:

https://hda3.dev/tcrno9/

https://minimap.dedyn.io/


Fewer features but usable!

[Lightning Phil]

This is part of the track that Robin Gemperle used to avoid a load of climbing  :  https://goo.gl/maps/Zs8Ps6YkcBTfvj5e6

It looks worse on his Instagram page.  It is buried somewhere in here but you may need a log in: https://www.instagram.com/stories/robingemperle/3154962130545936592/

That looks fairly tame, if you’ve got some tread on your tyres.  On slicks it’d be interesting but still okay.  If it saves a lot of climbing then not necessarily slower, even if some short sections need walking.

[quixoticgeek]

Wtf is Mikko doing?

J

[JonBuoy]

Wtf is Mikko doing?

J

Collecting VV tiles?

[quixoticgeek]

I does make you kinda wonder.

Looking at it, he might be a bloody genius.

Just plotted the route from where he is to the CP. and while he'll have to ride a bit of the parcour. It may just have the least amount of climbing of all the options for getting into Slovenia.

J

[morbihan]

Took the drava bike path on TCRno5. Nice little roll that. However I was heading on up to Wolfsburg and Slovakia, not South to Slovenia. Very left field move. Be interesting to see what he has planned.

[peterc]

If anyone else is getting frustrated by the official FollowMyChallenge tracker

Thank you so much, I was finding the official tracker superpoo (ended up having to use another browser and everything)
So much better...


[Edit]OOh and it has a direct link to the streetview of the road they are on as well.