- Morning trainiacs.
As a lot of you know, I am a devoted Zwifter.
By the way, go follow me.
First name is T, last name is Riathlontaren.
But doesn't mean I can't go and date other apps.
I was having a chat the other day
with the guy who started an app called FulGaz,
FulGaz, which is video, it's like actual video Zwift,
so they go and they take video,
and stabilize the footage, and then overlay
all this data so that, as you're riding on it,
just like on Zwift, you get differences in the terrain.
And having just built that app himself,
going through all of the issues
that he went through, learning all the lessons
that us new online entrepreneurs go through,
unfortunately, he had a little bit
of advice about how to develop the Team Trainiac Website.
It was very well-founded, helped me out a lot,
and I figure, you know what, hey,
this guy's helped me out, why don't I try out FulGaz?
(claps) Sounds cool.
And Mike was saying, Mike's his name,
that they have optimized FulGaz
really, really well for the Wahoo KICKR
and the Wahoo KICKR CLIMB.
So we're gonna go for a ride on FulGaz
with the Wahoo KICKR, the Wahoo KICKR CLIMB,
give you my impressions.
(lively dance music)
So what Mike was telling me, and I think
I've got this right, is that they have
actually set up the way that FulGaz communicates
with the Wahoo setup in such a way
that the KICKR gets the information
from FulGaz a second earlier than hitting a gradient change,
and the CLIMB gets it, I think,
two seconds earlier, and that is
what actually gives you a more realistic feel.
Even though this is changing earlier
than that, I think this needs more time to change,
and that catches up like (claps) right away.
Next, he said that if you're just setting
up FulGaz for the first time, and you'd
previously been set up with your Wahoo
on Zwift, you have to wake up your KICKR
and all of the peripherals attached to it,
disconnect it from Zwift, and then,
basically from scratch, reconnect
it to FulGaz, because Wahoo does
not play nice connected to multiple devices at a time.
I could've told you that.
I learned that one the hard way.
Then he said that the absolute best,
best, best, best way to experience FulGaz is
with one of the last two generation Apple TVs.
I don't have that.
I've got an Apple TV 2, so in that case,
the best way to experience it is to download
whatever ride you wanna do to the phone,
and then AirPlay it to your Apple TV.
And the reason for actually downloading the ride,
and not just streaming the ride,
is because the ride is such high-quality 4K footage
so that it can be really immersive.
If you download it, it's going to take
that streaming of that footage out of the equation,
saving more bandwidth for the actual AirPlay.
And they've got some of the most iconic rides around.
So for example, today, we're gonna give a shot
to the Kona Ironman complete course.
Have you heard about that race?
Hmm, I'm not gonna do the complete course.
Let's give it a shot (laughs).
It's Transition.
I know that restaurant.
(lively Latin-esque music)
Oh, I don't care what y'all say,
I'm living that hard SP2 life.
Queen K, I like it.
First impressions of FulGaz.
Well, for the first 10 minutes, rough, very rough.
What I was finding was that even though
I had downloaded the course, the phone talking
to Apple TV was very skippy, really, really skippy.
So what they say is there are a few different options.
Number one, FulGaz is only the second indoor riding app,
second only to Zwift, to have an Apple TV app.
You need a recent Apple TV, which has the addition
of apps to it, but what you have
in that case is that I think the Apple TV
only allows three different Bluetooth pairings,
one of which is already the remote,
second of which is your trainer,
so that leaves the third as either your cadence
or your heart rate, one or the other.
So I think the best option is that
you get yourself a recent Apple phone,
an iPhone 8 or newer, because then
you've got wireless charging, which
you can put your phone on, and then
you can have it charge, do a really long ride,
because these types of apps
just chew through battery life on a phone.
In addition to that, all of the earlier communications
that they make with the climb are kinda noticeable.
It creates a really nice ride experience,
but what I found was that, because
their incline is going in increments
of tenths of a degree, there were
more subtle movements, and in Zwift,
it's a very subtle, gradual movement,
whereas this is more (makes creaking sound).
In the end, when I figured it out,
and the phone caught up, and it rolled
really nicely, it was a very nice ride.
Few things to note.
Number one, no Android.
I actually find that, I think,
somewhere around 80-some or more percent
of my interaction with followers is Apple,
so kinda just makes sense when
you're a small team like FulGaz
and not the hundreds of people
that Zwift has, with $45 million
in funding, that you gotta focus
on what the masses are consuming.
Also, when I started riding, I went with reactive speed.
That's like Zwift, where you start,
and slow down, and speed up, the video slows
down and speeds up with you, just like Zwift.
I didn't like that, because as you're slowing down,
all of a sudden, the framerate of the video got choppy,
and cars were kinda going in slow motion.
So even though it's, in theory,
more realistic, it wasn't very realistic.
When you're going in steady speed,
it's just going at the rate that the rider
actually filmed the video in, and that's okay,
but your distance is gonna be a little off,
because the distance is going to be the distance
that the rider went in the time that you rode.
But the actual gradient, the resistance
of the smart trainer, is all going
off of the actual course and your inputs.
So it's still really good, it's just
that there's just a bit of a mismatch.
And because it's not a controlled world,
like Zwift, you do have real-world things happen
to the footage.
You stop at a stop light, even if
you're still pedaling, it either stops,
or it cuts, and then shoots you forward.
There are also moments when you can tell,
because they had a GoPro at 4K filming
all of this, there are times when,
in a long ride like this, the footage
just stopped, because I'm sure
they had to change an SD card.
And the video is just a little bit dark
in some areas, because it's filmed
with a GoPro, and it's filmed in real light settings.
But I think about
why people would use Zwift versus using this.
I think if you were training for a specific course,
like if I were to qualify for Ironman Kona,
I would want to do a ton of rides
on this course so that I can get familiar with it,
and then when I get there, it's not
mentally new to go through all
of the different areas of the ride.
I can easily break up the race
into different sections because I know
all of the different sections.
As of the end of August, this was,
I think, 364 courses, and they're building
more every single week, because
what they do is they allow people
to shoot their own rides and upload
it to the system, and then FulGaz will work on it.
So I think that as more triathletes get on it,
as they start choosing the more popular courses,
the Lake Placids of the worlds,
the Ironman Oceansides, the Challenge Roths of the world,
hopefully they can pull more triathletes in,
because I know that it would be very
mentally sharpening to be able
to go and ride the actual course
over, and over, and over, with the undulation,
and basically, by the time you get there,
it's your home course, and you got home course advantage.
But because it's a small company, some of the aspects
of the polish of Zwift aren't gonna be there.
But in that case, that's not what you're paying for.
You're paying for the ability to ride the actual course
that you are going to be racing on.
So I'm cool with it.
So there you go, trainiacs.
That's FulGaz versus Zwift.
They each have their purpose, and now
you know the purpose of FulGaz.
If you aren't already subscribed,
hit the subscribe button below,
and if you are subscribed, go give FulGaz a try.