Training Camps

Training camps can be used by Teams and Race Organisers to add a group of routes themselves without needing to send routes to the team at VeloViewer.  Typically this will be for:

  • A Team’s training camp.
  • A Race Organiser for the early stages of planning a future race.

Race Organisers: If you are at the early stages of preparation, when you will regularly be updating the stage routes, then it is better to create a training camp so you can easily update the routes each time you need to without waiting for VeloViewer to do it for you.  Once you have finalised a race route (as much as is possible) then the GPX files should be shared with the VeloViewer team for proper processing (hooking up to the UCI calendar within VeloViewer to allow the sharing to teams, commissaires, media etc). From that point, any further changes will require sending VeloViewer the updated GPX files.  Once shared to teams, every update will be recorded in the race notes with images of the changes.

Creating and maintaining a Training Camp

Note: For Team Training Camps then we suggest creating your Routes directly in Strava. Please skip this next section…

Race Organisers using a training camp for a future race:

  1. Click the “Add training camp” setting the name and date of your race (one training camp per race, you can add multiple stages to the one camp).
  2. Create your race route in the routing software of your choice, this is the master-copy of the race route and should always be up-to-date. Please see Race Organiser Best Practice – Race Route Quality If using Strava to manually plot your routes, please skip to below.
  3. Export the GPX file.
  4. Head to the Strava Route Builder (requires a Strava Premium account) and use the “Upload GPX” button in the top left of the map to create a route from your GPX file.
  5. Save the Route and from the Route overview page, copy the full URL from your browser’s address bar.
  6. At the bottom right of your training camp in VeloViewer, click the “Add route” button and paste the route’s URL into the popup along with the stage date.
  7. Open the route from the VeloViewer Race Hub for the route to be fully populated.
  8. Repeat 2 to 6 for each stage.

Important: Don’t try and edit routes in the Strava’s Route Builder when the route was created from a GPX file. It will probably do unexpected things!

When you want to make a change to a stage in your Training Camp then:

  1. Open the route editor mentioned in #2 above, and make the required edits.
  2. Complete steps #3, #4 & #5 creating a brand new Strava Route.
  3. In your training camp, use the “Swap” button to paste in the new Route’s URL. This will now use this new Route for that stage.
  4. Open the route from the VeloViewer Race Hub for the route to be fully populated.
  5. Delete the old, no longer used Route in Strava.

If you use Strava as the main tool to map out your routes

Strava’s Route Builder is very good for plotting legal bike routes, so perfect for Team Training Camps as well as some races. If a race needs to go the wrong way along roads or on large roads that typically don’t allow cycling then you will need to use a different routing tool and follow the steps described above.

If you are using Strava to manually plot your routes, then skip steps #3 and #4 shown above. Also, when updating routes you can do that on your existing Strava Route, save the Route and then reload the stage from the VeloViewer Race Hub to allow it to pick up the changes.

For Race Organisers using the Strava Route Builder, when your route is confirmed and ready to share with teams, you will need to send us the GPX files. Same for when updates are needed, we need the GPX files. It allows us to hold a much better audit of what we have been given as they are fixed and timestamped copies of the route.

Important: Once a race route has been formally populated in VeloViewer (i.e. not a Training Camp), then the organiser needs to send the VeloViewer team GPX files (created in #3 above) for any changes.  This is still the case if you use Strava to manually build your routes.  All changes have to go through this process so the VeloViewer team can manually compare the new route with the previous route to create images of any changes to share with the teams and other stakeholders.