hartklop
hartklop is the training app we built for ourselves. It runs your smart trainer, turns the roads you ride outside into an old arcade racer, and keeps every ride on your own computer... no account, no subscription, and nobody's cloud in the middle.
Plan a route the way you already do, drop the file in, and that's your ride. When the road tilts up the trainer gets heavier, and when you roll over the top it lets go, so a climb you know from outside feels like the same climb in the garage. For roads in the US it uses real survey heights, which is the difference between a hill and a wobbly line of GPS numbers.
And then there's the picture... two lanes, trees, power poles and far hills in chunky pixels, with your numbers across the top and the next few miles laid out along the bottom. Ride it by day, at dusk or at night. Ride it alone, or put a ghost up the road and go get it... a steady pace you pick, or your own best ride on that same road.
Power, heart rate, cadence, speed, gear and grade sit up top, with the route and the ride's charts underneath, and all of it moves as you pedal. Put it on the big screen in front of the bike, keep it on a laptop, or prop your phone on the bars... it's the same ride on every one of them, and there's nothing to install on any of them.
Choose one and the trainer holds the watts for you, block by block, so all you have to do is keep the pedals turning. hartklop counts you into every effort and tells you what's coming, how long and how hard, and it puts that same countdown right into the game so your eyes never leave the road. A handful of workouts come with it, and writing your own is a few lines in a text file, sized to your own threshold.
Every ride is saved as you go, a second at a time, so if something falls over mid-ride you still have it. When you're done there's a page waiting... your numbers, the charts, your best efforts, how long you spent in each zone, and the stretch of road you covered.
Strava is one button, and nothing goes anywhere until you press it. Point a camera at yourself and you get a video too, with the game as you rode it and you in a little window beside the road.
hartklop talks to the trainer over the standard Bluetooth that fitness machines use, so it isn't tied to one brand. On a route it sets the grade for you, and in a workout it holds the watts. Ours is a Wahoo KICKR CORE.
Shift paddles on the bars click through virtual gears that match a real road bike... 52/36 up front and 11-34 out back... so a shift feels like one on the bike you ride outside. Heart rate comes straight off a watch that broadcasts it.
hartklop runs on a small computer next to the bike, and everything it knows about you stays on that computer. Your screens just open it like a web page.
hartklop is Afrikaans for heartbeat. I grew up in South Africa, I run ultras and I ride, and it doesn't matter which one I'm doing on the day... it all comes back to that one number on the watch. So that's what we called it.
Clint Seager, Circle Hook Productions
hartklop is brand new, and right now it lives on our own bikes. There's nothing to download yet and nothing to sign up for. The plan is a small computer with hartklop already on it, so you plug it in beside the bike and ride. If this looks like your kind of thing, or you'd like something built this way for your own gym, club or shop, email us... a real person reads every one and actually writes back.