Make weather forecatst available for future (private) workouts

Feature Requests
1

First of all I would like to thank you for the wonderful and extremely useful recent feature of showing weather conditions alongside of the planned routes of shared events.

I, as an intervals.icu user, would like to be able to see the weather in general and the wind forecast in particular alongside of a planned route for my upcoming (non-shared) workouts, too. I would like to use this feature to adapt/refine the planned route (e.g., start toward headwind, return with tailwinds), or to make better groupride planning via understanding the likely weather conditions of the planned tour (especially head-, side-, or tailwind conditions), etc.

2

For the ‘general’ forecast, the weather on the calendar is perfectly fine. You can see wind/rain forecast for the station that you have configured.

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For a planned route, it appears to be on the list.

3

For now you can use www.randoplan.com or the Epic Ride weather app.

Both work well with RWGPS routes. Randoplan probably comes closest to what you’re asking.

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4

What you write might be sufficient for runners, maybe. There a typical training session lasts a a few tens of minutes (even for marathons you rarely train longer than 60-120min per occasions).

The “general forecast” based on a single location is more-or-less useless for planning a bicycle workout, IMHO. I am talking about workouts lasting several hours (3h-4h-5+h) and spanning more than 100km-s. That is an everyday scenario for many cyclists.

5

That is the very reason for this Feature Request. To let us have it for non-shared events, too. :slight_smile:

6

I am not aware that I can plan a route for a workout on intervals.icu. In fact, I am not aware of any route planning feature, either. That would be great, indeed.

7

Here is an example of a (past) 160km ride of mine. It lasted ca. 5 hours. The wind direction rotated practically “everywhere”. A foresight into such conditions could be very valuable

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8

I’m primarily a cyclist and my major events are long duration, 200-300km. Even in that case, if you pick a central weather station, you will never be more 50-60km from it, that is in case it is a roundtrip. But you suggested a roundtrip by talking about starting with headwind and coming back with tailwind.
There are surely regions where the weather conditions vary largely over that distance, but for most regions they don’t. It can be the case in mountain stages or areas close to coastlines, but then you also have the uncertainty of what will happen and prognoses are much less trustable for those.
For training rides, roundtrips of 100-150km, I only get surprised by showers, which are by definition difficult to predict by time and exact location.
Thus, for my personal case, I consider the general forecast good enough. I look at the rain forecast to know how I should dress and at the wind direction to decide which loop I’m going to ride and in which direction. That is for training rides where I start from my home location.
And, you are correct, there is no route planning feature. But you can now attach a route file to a shared event and get weather prognoses on that. It is not yet possible on ‘private’ routes for workouts, but the phrasing ‘Currently’ makes me (perhaps faulty) conclude that it will come.

Regarding the example of the 160k ride, after the ride you see what was measured by the weather station (or stations because the closest one is used). That may be different by what was predicted, especially at times where weather forecasts are uncertain due to specific conditions.

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9

This is my yearly A-race, which is 315km long and as you can see it is pretty hard to select a “central weather station” :upside_down_face: Moreover, I definitely get farther away than “50-60km from start” during the race.

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Nevertheless, I feel this discussion is getting to morph into a matter-of-taste debate, which might not be ideal for this FR. :slight_smile:

I think the summary is: it would be really nice to be able see weather forecast alongside any planned routes, not just route I have already ridden, but also planned, future ones, too. Without going through quirky workarounds, such as creating fake niche “shared events” (and thereby polluting an otherwise useful and nice event-page intended for publicly relevant events).

So, if weather-preview will be possible for routes, then that could be fine, too, as long as I can upload any random route for this purpose. That is, it should work for routes other than which I already have happened to ride.

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