I’m lucky that I have some great (mostly road) riding right from my front door, but I find that I’m always riding the same routes. It probably just comes down to habit and knowing where the decent stops are (some great gas stations with clean bathrooms are a must!)
I’m usually busy with work/family/etc when not riding (like I’m sure we all are) so there’s usually just enough down time to dream about riding my bike but not enough to really sit down and do some planning There are probably some great tips that I’m missing so I wanted to see what you folks do to keep it fresh.
I’ve used wandrer.earth to good effect for this. You hook up your Strava and upload your ride history (I think you’ll have to pay a bit to get more than the last 50 or so rides but if you always do the same routes then that maybe won’t matter too much) and it then tells you which roads you have or have not ridden on. With the goal of riding as many as you can. It has leader boards and points and some other gamification but you can ignore that if you want.
It also has a chrome extension that can overlay that info onto Strava maps or RWGPS so you can see it while you’re planning a route. It also marks which roads are paved and which are gravel. It’s really helped me see like “Oh wow I always go down this road but if I turned off here it would take me around and over to here” and I’ve found some cool or at least different routes that way.
You do have to kinda know or at least look on google maps if the road is going to be rideable but I’ve really found it helpful to mix it up.
But yes, +1 for this. It has kept my motivation up for couple last years. I am running out of untouched paved and unpaved roads in 8h riding distance and need to switch to different strategy like taking train far away and riding back.
When started, it was really fun to combine new forest tracks with familiar roads: arriving from unknown path to known road felt like deja vu – everything is familiar but don’t know how, strongly desorientating feeling.
When we moved into our new house some friends gifted us a customised map centred on our house at 1:25000 scale, the printed map area 80cmx80cm so it covers 400square km. We have it mounted in the hallway its been great for planning routes for MTB, Gravel, and shorter road rides, in 1:50000 scale it would cover 1600 square km and be great for planning longer road rides.
Its find it much easier to trace out a route on the big open map on the wall than on a phone, tablet or even computer screen, and it saves having to clear the kitchen table to fold out a traditional map.
I’m sure there are others like me… I had a lot of fun last winter sitting down with a beer and RWGPS and street view and building some huge routes. The research is part of the fun. I typically knew i wanted to cover a certain amount of distance, be on safe roads, and have good stops. Do that for a few weeks and you have a bank of new routes.
Strava stalking is probably the easiest. Go find your local crit or road race team roster, look them up on strava, you’ll see their typical training ride. If any of it is close enough to your house just borrow the rest of the route. Then next time - do it backwards.
These all look like great suggestions, I would like to suggest VeloViewer. There are loads of extra statistics that you can look at but there is a section about riding to collect tiles. Once you get started it gets very addictive trying to expand your maximum square…
Strava has a feature where you can input information: length, terrain, etc., and it will create some routes for you. Might be worth toying around with that a bit.
I do the same - I watch routes on Strava ridden by people that live in my area and routes ridden by local clubs and use these to create new routes or modify old ones. But much like the OP - I have been riding from my house for many years so I know the good roads to ride, the ones to avoid, traffic patterns by time of day etc. so I have a few tried and true routes that I tend to cycle through.
Being able to carry more bottles gives more freedom to route planning. I used to do water stops but last summer I bought a hydration pack, I took off the bladder and just store extra bottles there.
Also I have a sks anywhere bottle mount on my bike. So I can have 3x950ml on the bike and 2x950ml in the hydration pack. That gives me freedom to plan a 5 hour route anywhere.
Ive set up my algorithm in RidewithGPS.com so I’m fairly confident that’ll give me a good road route, a quick drag of the inbuilt google street map man (if it goes blue, its usually a road) usually confirms it. The elevation map also shows if it on road, track or unknow surface. So my route planning can be minimal.
Yeah, what I usually do is have my route planner up, click on the start point, then kinda pick a general direction that I want to check out and then on google maps I search ‘gas station’ or ‘convenience store’ and I have the two up side by side and click on them in the route planner. Then I can usually have a general idea of how far I can go between stops (like 35-45 miles with two bottles depending on my speed and the heat). And when I click on the gas station it’ll be like maybe 25 miles away. Then with the wandrer browser extension I can see all the untraveled roads between my start and the rest stop and which of those are off road and I just play around with the route until I have a good combo of paved roads, distance, new roads, and non-highway roads.
Unfortunately, planning new routes that you’re unfamiliar with will always take much longer to plan for than just doing old tried and true ones.
I really like this idea! Thanks! It’s a rest week for me this week, so I think I’m going to take some time and build out some routes while I’m staring at the beautiful weather outside and going a bit nuts not riding
Yeah setting the rest stops as your ‘fixed points’ and then playing with how you get there has really sped up planning for me. Before I’d plan out this super interesting route and then be like “dang, I’m 45 miles into the route and 10 miles to the nearest refill and now I gotta redo it all”.
I also will do periodic Google Street View checks to check for shoulders or whatever else. Especially if I find that I might have to spend a bit of time on less than ideal road to connect the route together.
There are probably some great tips that I’m missing so I wanted to see what you folks do to keep it fresh.
