· Updated · 3 min read
Riding Tour du Pain on a power meter alone, no smart trainer needed
On 29 October Tour du Pain started riding on a power meter alone. Power pedals or a crank meter on a basic trainer or rollers are enough: your speed in the game follows your watts and the ride saves like any other. Two days later meters that don't send cadence worked fully as well.
What 1.19.2 changed
Before 1.19.2 you needed a smart trainer to ride. From that release a power meter on its own drives the ride. Speed follows the meter's watts. Cadence comes from a cadence sensor, or from the meter itself if it sends crank data. Heart rate shows when you wear a strap.
A basic trainer has nothing for the game to control, so the ERG switch and the resistance level are hidden on these rides. You change the effort with your gears, the way you would outside.
The ride saves and exports to .fit and Strava as a power-meter ride, so it lands in your log like any other. If you connect a smart trainer later in the ride, the trainer takes over.
Which power meters
Any Bluetooth power meter that speaks the standard Bluetooth Cycling Power profile should work: pedals like the Favero Assioma and Garmin Rally, and cranks or spiders from Stages, 4iiii and Quarq. Pick it as your trainer and you ride on power alone. It has to be Bluetooth, because browsers have no ANT+.
We've ridden Tour du Pain ourselves on one trainer, a Wahoo KICKR CORE. The power-meter path is tested on an emulator, not on each meter, so tell us how yours does. The guide to smart trainers that work in the browser lists what we know per model.
1.27.6: meters without cadence
Some meters and trainers don't send cadence at all. Until 1.27.6 on 31 October, the game read the missing cadence as legs that had stopped and braked you after 10 seconds. Now those sources ride fully on their power: no braking, and the FTP ramp test and riding along work. ERG works too, but only on a smart trainer without cadence; a power meter on a basic trainer shows the targets and you hold them yourself. For the current setup, see riding with a power meter only. The console shows a dash where cadence would be.
The same release fixed a few related things. A glitchy power spike above 3000 W is now ignored, and rides that an old spike had held back can upload. If your power meter goes quiet on a meter-only ride, the game says so instead of telling you to start pedalling. One error in a frame no longer freezes the ride on screen.
What changes, and what doesn't
A basic trainer can't push back. On the Col du Pain the gradient changes your speed in the game, never the resistance under your legs. Structured workouts still show their targets, and you hold them with your gears and your legs instead of letting ERG do it.
Everything else is the same as on a smart trainer. You ride in the bunch, talk and chat, join clubs and coffee rides, and your Col times count for the Leaderboard, which takes a trainer or a power meter.
The full set-up, from pairing to gearing, is in riding with a power meter only. How the rides reach Strava, Garmin Connect or intervals.icu is in Strava, Garmin and .fit files.