I am most definitely biased, but I think cycling is the best sport in the World. Unlike many traditional team sports, it’s something you can do far beyond your school and university days. It’s a lifelong sport and one of the most effective ways to see the world. Cars seem to go too fast to appreciate the scenery and walking doesn’t get your far enough. On top of all of the enjoyable aspects of cycling, it’s also therapeutic with the rhythmic motion being cited as meditative, the aerobic aspect being good for your heart, and the nature of the sport makes it a common rehabilitation exercises for various injuries. Even the best things have their limitations, though. Here are 5 things that cycling and cyclists often lack.

1.) Weight Bearing

Wolff’s law of bone explains that bones respond to the forces placed upon them. In other words, if you stress your bones, they will become stronger. This isn’t a completely novel concept; we are used to the idea of the body getting stronger due to stressors. We place stress or force on muscles and we expect them to grow bigger and stronger. Bones are no different. 

Bones will get stronger from forces such as weight lifting or even running where there is pounding and force going through the skeleton. Cycling, though, is considered a non-weight bearing sport. 

If cyclists don’t stress their bones through other activities, they are at risk for their bones to become weaker and weak bones are more likely to succumb to injuries. Cyclists should take special efforts to load their bones through other cross-training activities. Personally, I do weight training year-round. I supplement my cycling workouts with 2 heavy lifting sessions each week. 

2.) Lateral Movement

Cycling occurs exclusively in the sagittal plane. This means that in cycling we are only moving forward. Unlike sports like basketball or soccer that require athletes to move both forwards and sideways, cycling mainly uses the muscles that move our bodies forward. 

Since we aren’t stressing the muscles that move our bodies from side to side, these muscles will often atrophy or become weak. Despite not using them for forward propulsion, we still need these muscles for stabilization, injury prevention, and being a well-rounded human. 

The Gluteus Medius is a muscle often underused in cycling that can cause issues when it fails to fire. A weak Gluteus Medius can result in knee pain, IT band issues, low back pain, and hip pain. In order to strengthen your Gluteus Medius consider adding fire hydrants, clam shells, lateral leg raises, and/or lateral band walks to your pre-exercise routine. I spend 5 minutes before every ride completing glute medius exercises. Fire hydrants and clam shells are my staples. 

3.) Eccentric Movement

Cycling is primarily an exercise of concentric movement. Concentric exercises involves the muscles shortening when working against resistance (the upward phase of a squat). Eccentric movements involve the muscles lengthening (such as the downward phase of squat).

There are many benefits to concentric exercise such as building muscle mass and concentric exercises are easier on the muscles (causing less soreness). Eccentric exercises often cause more soreness, but they also help to strengthen tendons and can be helpful for injury prevention. In order to be a well-rounded athlete, you should work to include both concentric and eccentric exercises in your workout routine. For me, eccentrics are as simple as emphasizing the eccentric phase of certain lifts I do in my weight training routine. For example, I will concentrate on a slow and controlled downward phase of my back squats.

4.) Good Posture

In a world where we fight against poor posture constantly, cycling seems to only make things worse. After leaning over our laptops all day with rounded shoulders and a curved spine, we then head out on our after-work ride with rounded shoulders and a curved spin as we reach for our handlebars. 

Cyclists need to spend special time working on posture. In my own routine, I include exercises like wall angels, cat cow, bird dogs, and open thoracic books to encourage my body to return to neutral after all of my many hours of forward slouching on the bike. 

5.) Upper Body Strength

Cyclists never miss leg day! Upper body day, though, some cyclists are actually scared of it. If you’re a road cyclist then you may wonder why upper strength even matters especially when looking at World Tour Cyclists. If you’re a mountain biker, though, you understand that upper body strength is critical for controlling your bike, avoiding crashes, and surviving the inevitable crash without broken bones. Either way, we need upper body strength to be functional humans. Don’t be afraid of lifting weights. Some of my favorite upper body exercises are overhead press, landmine rows, and single arm dumbbell snatches. If nothing else, start small with body weight exercises such as push ups, pull ups, and tricep dips. You’ll be thankful for your extra efforts when carrying groceries inside, lifting up your child or grandchild, or putting your suitcase in the overhead bin.

Everything in Moderation

I’m definitely not telling you to cycle less! In fact, a great thing about cycling is that unlike sports like running, it’s relatively easy on the body which means we can log more hours than most sports. That said, it’s still important to take everything in moderation and to supplement our favorite sport with some additional exercises to keep us strong enough so that we can ultimately do even more pedaling.

The post 5 Things Cyclists Lack first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

Everyone thinks they understand Kona until they go to Kona. It’s just hot and humid, right? People who live in Arizona and ride in 110° assume it’s the same as if you’re on the Queen K. If you’re  riding on the east coast in Northern New York, that;s really hot and humid, I got this, its the same. But then you get to Kona and that’s the day you learn that it’s not the same. It’s just different. You don’t know her until you meet her.

Professional American triathlete Ben Kanute is no different. He’s never raced in Kona; he’s only done two Ironman distance races, and so when he told me at the beginning of this year that his sole focus was to win Kona, I kind of rolled my eyes and chuckled inside a little bit. Then, as a good friend and person in the industry who is American and wants to see an American win again, I said, “OK.” I then pulled up my big boy pants and asked how I could help? I didnt hear much from Ben about it. He was probably a little pissed at the eye roll. But hey this is sport, and what doesn’t fuel the fire lets the fire go out.

When he told me he was doing a camp, I assumed he would at least have a chance to realize that Kona is not just hot, humid, and windy — it’s Kona. Ben’s 2024 hasn’t exactly gone to plan (yet). He went to some early season races and, to be honest, he got his butt kicked. His plans for winning the best of the best was not looking good. He was jumping into the T100 series and just getting left in the dust, coming out in the top swim spots but losing time on the bike and getting passed on runs, finishing 14th in Miami, DNF at Singapore, 12th in San Francisco, 2nd in Mont Tremblant, and then DNF in London.

Around that time Zipp reached to us and asked us to come to the ARC wind tunnel to do a feature on Ben.

To recap that story, Ben went to Indy as a short-course athlete and left as a man who was ready, in my opinion, to compete in an Ironman. The wind tunnel trip taught Ben and his team exactly what we hoped it would teach him. It taught him he could, positionally, move up and out without adding drag. This also allowed him to open his hips and decrease the strain on his lower back. It taught him that TT helmets are way more aero than road bike helmets and that even a specific type of calf sleeves were a little faster than his skin.

But what it didn’t teach him was whether or not those things were going to be 100% translatable for him personally in Hawaii. And the only thing that was going to teach him that was personal experience there. So Ben and his coach Jim Vance did just that. They went over and spent eight days putting together the largest training block that Ben had ever done. And ultimately figure out whether the things they learned in the tunnel were transferable into the big day in Kona.

They wanted to look at his position, particularly with the new aero bar system, and making sure that it was not only comfortable, but actually worked at all. When you go from 5° tilt to a 15° tilt on the aero bar, a common sense practical question comes up: are your arms going to slide down the bars when it’s 100° out and you’re tired, sweaty, and pouring water all over yourself at every ad station on the bike? Would those little rubber pieces on the bottom act like they’re supposed to?

Public Service announcement. Ben will have a white TT Helmet for Kona

• Are you going to be able to handle the crosswinds after the turnaround of Hawi, where you have the ability to go 50MPH into a 30-mile-an-hour crosswind?
• Can you handle a front 858NSW wheel all the time?
• Does the new TT helmet work for you? Does it give you the ventilation you need? Does it allow you to get water inside without risking the front cover coming off?
• Do you take the time to put on calf sleeves in T1? Do you want to wear them in the swim?

Ben ended up doing a 30+ hour training week in the unique conditions of Kona and ended it with an Ironman simulated race day adventure.

That day included:

Swim: 2.5 miles, 48:49 time, 1:06/100 yards

3.5 hour bike
86.5 miles, 24.8 MPH average
276 average watts, 203 TSS, .76 IF, 1.07 VI

Run stats are secret

Then a 90-minute run (3 x 10 mins @ race pace, then cruise).

As we all know, that isn’t the full distance, but they calculated it as if it was equal to it from a training perspective based on the level of load Ben was under.

They started the day about an hour and a half after what would be the race start so that Ben could be doing the bulk of the session in the hottest parts of the day, It did exactly what it was supposed to simulate both mental or physical pain and fatigue.

The only thing that I felt like we failed at was the number of pit stop rests Ben took. At the same time, we also didn’t want to put Ben at risk, or mess with the locals on the Queen K as we simulated handing bottles off to somebody that was going 20 – 30 MPH on a bike. So we did our best to find situations where we could pull way over to the side to make sure traffic was never impeded. However, we failed a little at the end when we just ran out of parking spots while Ben was in the final stretch of his run. We still, however, pulled way over and gave people enough space and hopefully a little bit of laughter while some 5’10 white kid stood on a scale, half-dressed in spandex, waiting to eat his salt and vinegar chips.

You don’t know Kona until you meet her, and Ben took the time to introduce himself to her and ask her for help in his quest for glory in two weeks.

Grab your popcorn and enjoy the Kona Movie We follow Ben on a run before the big day, the big day, and end with a bit of FPV run the following morning.

The post You Don’t Know Kona Until You Meet Her first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

Garmin acquired FirstBeat Analytics in June of 2020, the news made relatively little impact. I think most of that was timing, as it came during the peak of the pandemic lockdown. It also wasn’t much of a change for end users, as Garmin had already been using FirstBeat – as a licensee – in its products for over a decade. But the acquisition represented what – in hindsight – seems to have been a clear shift in Garmin’s fundamental approach to its fitness business. Owning FirstBeat allowed Garmin to become an “ecosystem” company rather than simply a product company. Garmin now makes systems. And the products it makes are designed to work within those systems. In some cases, their products only really make sense when you view them through the lens of the system rather than as a standalone offering. 

As the FirstBeat, Tacx, and Vector (power-meter pedals) acquisitions show, Garmin has generally sought to expand its ecosystem via acquisition. It certainly has made some truly innovative products – like the Varia Radar – but its real genius has been finding companies that can easily meld into its ecosystem and help expand its reach. The other company that has followed a similar trajectory of moving from a product company to an ecosystem company, largely on the back of acquiring companies and then using those acquisitions to build a richer and more comprehensive ecosystem is SRAM. The SRAM of today looks nothing like the SRAM of 2006/2007, when they launched their first RED road grouppo. SRAM today is an ecosystem company. Quarq was probably its most important acquisition, not because of the powermeters, but because of acquiring Jim Meyer, who now leads all things digital, which – for SRAM – is basically everything. Even more interestingly, SRAM doesn’t just not resemble itself anymore; it also doesn’t resemble Shimano either. Shimano, meanwhile, has remained largely unchanged in terms of the type of business it is. 

Unquestionably, the most important fittech acquisition of this millenia was Garmin’s 2006 acquisition of Dynastream, the creators of the ANT protocol. Garmin was just starting to get into fittech with its Forerunner line – I had one of those classic pill-shaped Forerunner 201s. And I think they saw that connectivity was really the key to making fittech work. The Edge 500 wouldn’t come out for a few more years, but I am sure Garmin was already imagining such a product. Notably, after acquiring Dynastream, they initially tried a licensing model with ANT. They quickly pivoted though, open-sourcing it and starting the entirely separate ANT consortium – thisisant.com, which was certainly the right decision to spur widespread adoption. While BLE has finally caught up – and some might say surpassed ANT, owing to its inclusion on mobile phones, ANT really set the stage for the wireless fittech ecosystem. It was low power. And it just worked. I still basically don’t really trust BLE, and I will always opt to pair via ANT for sensors that support both protocols. In 15 years of using it, ANT+ has just been bulletproof across all manner of devices, both measuring devices and computers/watches. Without ANT, none of what followed would have been possible, since ANT opened the door for devices to talk to each other. It allowed an ecosystem to grow.

The ecosystem approach was almost certainly a case of imitation and self-preservation as well as innovation. Garmin increasingly has to compete with the exemplar ecosystem company – Apple. It’s especially interesting to see Garmin not only protecting their areas, but also (sort of) moving into Apple’s Garmin has GarminPay, allowing you to pay with just your watch at wireless terminals. Garmin also recently launched Garmin Messenger, which allows you to communicate using an InReach device when you are in the backcountry with people on their phones. I think part of the reason why Apple has struggled to make more inroads with serious athletes is because Garmin has so aggressively – and so effectively – continued to make the Garmin ecosystem more feature rich. 

I have had an idea percolating in my mind for a couple years about how to write about this. It first came to me when Garmin introduced the Varia Radar. I became more convinced of the shift in Garmin’s approach when they acquired Tacx in 2019. And then followed that up by acquiring FirstBeat. But I never could find a hook. It felt overly editorial – “this is this thing that I see happening.” It lacked the experiential quality that I think is essential to good storytelling. If you want to know the nuts and bolts of how a fitness product works, it’s essentially impossible to beat Ray Maker of DC Rainmaker. And the pure editorializing just doesn’t feel all that compelling. But when I started mountain biking with my oldest son this past winter and decided to return to triathlon and do my first XTerra race, I had an idea about how to tell this story. I’ve been an on-again-off-again user of various fitness platforms for years, but the one constant has been Garmin Connect. Since 2009, I’ve tracked virtually every run I’ve done using a Garmin Forerunner. And since 2010, I’ve tracked virtually every ride with a Garmin Edge. I’ve since resorted to using just a Forerunner for everything, something I talked about my article about how A Clean Cockpit Is More Fun.

Could This System Help Me? Can It Help You?

While I had made the decision to ignore pretty much all data during my rides, I became increasingly intrigued by the data that Garmin was offering after them. Garmin clearly had a lot of ideas about what I should be doing for training, how I should be recovering, and more. I wondered, what if I actually listened to some of them? What if I actually dove into the Garmin ecosystem as part of training for an XTerra. I’ve always been skeptical of HRV as a standalone metric, but what about its utility when rolled into a larger package that also has detailed insights into your actual training? I figured at the very least, it would give me something to obsess over now that I’d committed to not obsessing over power.

This nicely coincided with the major overhaul – first seen via public beta – of Garmin Connect, both the web app and the phone app. Garmin Connect had always seemed like a non-priority for Garmin. They seemed generally happy to cede that ground on the social side to Strava and on the fitness and tracking side to more specialized sites like TrainingPeaks. Connect was always “good enough,” but not really much more. But with the recent update, it was clear that Connect’s importance to the ecosystem was becoming clearer, and it could no longer afford to be ignored

In deciding which device to use as the backbone for my experiment, I debated heavily between the Forerunner 965 and the Epix Pro. Since FirstBeat’s analytics tech is the foundational piece here, I was strongly tempted to go with the Epix 2, which has the newer Elevate 5 sensor, which offers skin temperature reading, over the Elevate 4 in the 965. And, of course, it’s just newer. So any attempt to glean insight about the usefulness of buying into Garmin’s ideas about training seemed like it ought to rely on the latest hardware. But having owned a Fenix, I also much prefer the fit and feel of the lighter Forerunner watches. I ended up requesting a 965, which Garmin graciously provided for this article. 

An article like this would have been a lot more difficult before Garmin introduced TrueUp, which incorporates all workouts from all devices and some key partners into your training data. You could do it if you just wore your Forerunner for everything – as I do, but you’d have to record your indoor sessions on it as well. And if you prefer to use a cycling computer, it makes sense to use that for cycling rather than needing to use the watch. TrueUp was maybe the first indication that Garmin Connect was going to play a larger role than it had, as it now served as the aggregator and disseminator of information. I can see all my workouts on my watch, whether or not I’ve actually recorded them on my watch.

Given that I was also training for an XTerra, I also was curious what sort of insights I’d get from using a Garmin powermeter. While the heart rate data is primary, Garmin uses power data on the bike to estimate VO2Max, which is part of how it calculates fitness trends and training efficacy. For running, it’s a combination of heart rate data and pace. Garmin provided me with a pair of the Rally XC200 dual sided pedals as well.

Sleeping With A Watch On Kind Of Stinks

The most difficult part of this whole experiment for me was getting used to sleeping with a watch on. Overnight data is required for FirstBeat to calculate HRV, which is a requirement for getting “Training Readiness” information. You can get the Training Status data without it – that’s based primarily on your actual training data; but even this is somewhat limited as Garmin uses HRV data to indicate periods of “Strain,” which is low HRV combined with declining VO2Max. So I had to learn to sleep with a watch. This made me doubly glad to have the 965, as it’s a lot lower profile than a Epix. After trying unsuccessfully to wear the watch through the night – I’ve literally never slept with my watch on – and getting abysmal sleep scores as a result, sleep scores that were doubly bad because Garmin assumed I had only slept until the point at which I took my watch off, not from when I bed until the point at which I put it back on, I finally managed to solve sleeping by rotating the watch so the face was on the inside of my wrist rather than the back of my wrist. I’m a stomach sleeper, and with the watch in this position, I was mostly able to forget it was there. Now, some six months later, I don’t really mind it too much, though I think Garmin absolutely needs to match Samsung and – rumor has it – Apple by making a ring. As Oura has pretty clearly demonstrated, you can fit all this technology in a ring, and that’s unquestionably the most comfortable form factor for sleeping. The disadvantage that Oura and Whoop have when competing with Garmin here is that they only have the heart rate data. They don’t know things like pace or watts. I think Whoop and Oura will struggle to make real inroads against not only Garmin, but also Polar and Suunto, which also are able to use information from connected sensors to enhance their understanding of training load. But form factor matters a lot. If I hadn’t committed to exploring this ecosystem fully, I would have given up after a few rough nights. I want the Garmin Ring. And I’m actually semi-surprised that it doesn’t exist yet. I think part of this is Garmin’s deep roots as a GPS company. Garmin GPS is – and always has been – superb. The only times I’ve ever had issues with accuracy was back when Garmin used to default to “Smart” recording rather than 1s recording as the default. Smart recording is still an option, but it seems that it was set to 1s by default on my 965, though that may have been the result of pairing a powermeter early on. Given how many of Garmin’s core products exist without GPS these days, I think a smart ring is not impossible, and I’ll be immensely glad when it arrives. Until then, I made the sacrifice to sleep with my watch on in the name of scientific discovery.

Training Load And Training Readiness.

It takes a few days of overnight wearing to incorporate the sleep data into Training Readiness. And then even longer for Garmin to establish an HRV baseline. But once you’ve worn your watch continuously for about a week, you’ll start to see the full Training Readiness data populate. This is based on:

• Sleep, which is the result of your “sleep score,” which factors in total duration, deep sleep time, REM sleep time, and both duration and frequency of “awake” periods
• Recovery Time, which is in response to specific training activities
• HRV Status, which is determined by the relative value of your previous nights HRV “score” to your 7D baseline range
• Acute Load, which is not actually the specific load in terms of quantity, but rather its ratio to your chronic load.
• Sleep History, which is your 7d sleep score average
• And Stress History, which supposedly measures your intra-day stress levels, but which has basically only ever told me that my days are fairly low stress. Which is maybe a sign that I’m just inoculated against getting stressed out by virtue of having four kids or, more likely, that I’m quite fit and so my intra-day resting heart rate – what I suspect it’s actually using – is quite low. I found Stress History to be entirely worthless.

Of these, I found the Acute Load – and Garmin’s sense of training load – to be by far the most useful. I’ve used TrainingPeaks fairly religiously since 2014, and I think – especially for ultra-endurance training like Ironman, that TSS is generally quite useful. But one thing that I always felt it lacked – at least for me – was that it failed to capture the load of threshold and supra-threshold workouts effectively. I found that really, really hard workouts – longer time-trials, anything over 30min in particular – would take me at least a week or more to fully recover from. And yet in TrainingPeaks they just showed whatever the TSS for that workout was. A 30min TT was no more significant than an easy 3hr ride. But with Garmin, those hard workouts were reflected dramatically. I did a hard Zwift session that involved a near-maximal effort on Alpe du Zwift, and Garmin had a training load score for that workout that was through the roof. Note that Garmin generally only calculates training load for workouts recorded on Garmin devices. There are some very special exceptions here with special partners – like Zwift. But you can’t just upload any ride with HR data and get training load information from it. Notably, Garmin doesn’t actually care about power when calculating load. Only HR. But it was very interesting to see how dramatically Garmin scored sustained periods at/above threshold as compared with TrainingPeaks. For me, this was the first real indication that there was real utility in the FirstBeat analysis.

While I’d previously been skeptical of sleep trackers, the sleep measurements help cement something that I had intuited but only fairly casually. I saw a marked difference in sleep quality between nights when I was in bed before 9PM (I get up around 5am) and nights when when I was in bed after 9:30PM. Even if I managed to sleep in a bit, the quantity of my measured deep sleep – which Garmin reports as occurring very early in my sleep cycle – are markedly different. If I go to bed early, I get a lot more deep sleep, which helped explain to me why even if I got an equivalent amount of total sleep, I felt so much better with an early-to-bed-early-to-rise approach. And this became emblematic of my relationship with my 965. It has a lot of opinions. Many of these I disregard. But I do not entirely ignore them. If I sense there’s a nugget of wisdom or truth, I try to isolate that part, make use of it, and chuck the rest. I did not rely on it telling me what to do. But I did find it helped me to make better decisions about what to do.

HRV vs RHR

My skepticism about the usefulness of HRV is largely unchanged however. It seemed to correlate almost exactly with overnight resting HR, something which is much simpler to understand. HRV did reflect that harder training sessions later in the day tended to impact my recovery, but I saw that exact same data in my overnight RHR and sleep score. I came away from this experiment with a better sense of what HRV actually shows and how it might be used – certainly much better than my 2013 experiment in the early days of HRV when I tried to use a system based only around intraday orthostatic tests (which you can take using the “Daily Health Snapshot” feature), but it still feels redundant to the classic RHR. My fundamental opinion of HRV – that it only tells you what you already know – is largely unchanged.

In addition to Training Readiness, Garmin also provides Training Status. Training Status is designed to provide insight on your training over the long term, whether your fitness is generally increasing or decreasing. There are eight distinct training status states, each of which has a helpful but brief description as to what it is meant to indicate; they are listed on Garmin’s dedicated tech page for the Training Status feature.

Sub-Disciplines Are – And Are Not – The Same Sport

These are based off of VO2Max estimates, HRV data, and Acute Load (again, the ratio with chronic load). In general, I found these to be useful with a couple major caveats. And this is where my sense of what Garmin was – and more importantly was not – useful for started to emerge. On the running side, because it’s based on pace, I found that incorporating a lot of trail running would very much skew my metrics. That’s because there’s no ability for Garmin to reason about “technical” trails. Likewise, very steep trails – especially when descending – tends to throw NGP (normalized graded pace) for a loop, especially if those trails are also technical. On the road, I think there’s a very clear correlation between pace and fitness. That is also true when trail running, but the numbers are not equivalent. And this is really the biggest weakness of the FirstBeat approach. It treats all subcategories of a sport as the same. I.e., if you go for an easy 5K on the road at 4:30/km and your HR is 125bpm and then do an easy 5K on the trails at 5:00/km and your HR is 130bpm, that’s a sign of “decreasing” fitness. It does use NGP – so it accounts for the hilliness of the route, but it cannot account for the technical nature of running, nor does NGP work well, in my experience, for steep stuff. For running, this sort of okay, because you can opt-out certain sports from VO2 estimates. Once I told Garmin not to consider my trail running activities when calculating my running VO2, I found the data was much smoother, but also substantially less useful. My trail runs still counted towards my overall load, but Garmin could no longer reliably infer fitness gains from a fast trail run, because that run would often be relatively slow compared to a fast road run.Especially for someone with less experience training – I fundamentally know what works for me as a an athlete after 25 years of elite endurance sport, that could be incredibly confusing. And while you can wholesale discount certain sports, there’s no way to tell Garmin to ignore a specific activity, at least for VO2 purposes, or to possibly override it manually. This means that your HR monitor better be reliable. Thankfully, the built in Elevate 4 sensor is incredibly good. It’s actually shockingly accurate most of the time. But I still wear a chest strap for most of my training. But I had an older heart rate strap that I was using early in the year that had started to go on the fritz, and I would sometimes get periods of wildly high heart rate. This both dramatically increased my training load score and also resulted in Garmin assuming my fitness had tanked. And there’s literally no option to override values. Here’s where something like TrainingPeaks, where you just edit a workout and punch in a score for TSS is clearly superior. Garmin alludes to FirstBeat being able to detect aberrant data, but I would not say I found that to be the case. Maybe egregiously bad data, but not data that’s not impossible but is certainly implausible.

Unfortunately, this same locked-in approach is even worse with cycling. If you have a powermeter, Garmin gives you no option to opt a discipline out of cycling VO2Max. But I was training for XTerra. And I am not a particularly skilled MTBer. Especially on technical trails, my HR:power ratio is very different from what it is on the road. This was initially exacerbated by the fact that the Rally pedals I received, according to a static torque test using my tuned 20kg (+/-5g) mass that I have specifically for calibrating my powermeters indicated that the Rally’s were tuned about 2% low out of the box. And then, checking my Quarq, it seemed that when I’d switched from a gravel specific 42T ring to a road specific 50T ring – I run 1X on all my bikes, in spite of Quarq saying recalibration when swapping rings is not needed, my Quarq was 2% high in that same test. Once I got both powermeters in line with each other – and confirmed that they reported the same while riding, things were closer, but my HR was still higher MTBing. That’s partially because I’m not a great MTBer. But I also think fundamentally MTBing is more generally taxing than road riding. TrainingPeaks allows you to set a different FTP per discipline. But not Garmin. Cycling is cycling just like running is running. But that’s just not true. Ironically, realizing the overall utility of HR made me feel pretty good about simply taking power off of my MTB. While I couldn’t chose to opt out if I had power, I could opt out by simply not connecting to those pedals or by just putting my regular Shimano SPDs on.

The Rallys are an interesting proposition. They’re substantially more expensive – just over $1100 – than their direct competition, the Favero Assioma – just over $700, which also allows for pedal body switching and is also rechargeable. The Rallys really only make sense within the context of the Garmin ecosystem. In Garmin connect, if you have Rally pedals, you get a ton of incredible information about how you ride. Time standing vs seated, especially relevant for gravel and other endurance racers. Average cadence standing vs sitting. Power balance data but also information about where in the pedal stroke you apply power with each leg. Is this data useful or actionable? I’m not entirely sure. I have nearly identical L/R balance, and while I found the data on seated vs standing fascinating, I also wasn’t really sure how I could use it in a meaningful way. If you’re a data geek, the Rally pedals are phenomenal. They were bombproof in terms of reliability, and they offer real information about how you pedal. And, if you’re viewing all of this in Garmin Connect anyway – as Garmin is pushing you to do, then it’s a one stop shop. At 5mm taller (10mm total thickness increase) than the absurdly thin Shimano XTR pedals, they are thicker than the Assiomas as well, but only a bit. I didn’t have any times where I clipped a rock that I thought was solely due to the pedals. But ultimately, I was put off of using them for a few reasons. The first is a bit unique to me, though I suspect I am not the only person in this situation. I think that, fundamentally, you need to stick to a single system for measuring power. It’s clear now that power is less clearly reliable than we’ve been led to believe. And it’s certainly less transferable. If you are a Quarq user, stick to Quarq. I personally believe that spider-based powermeters are the most accurate. Even after recalibrating both devices, I found the Garmin pedals read low relative to my Quarq during “bursty” efforts. Interestingly I also found that my spindle-based Quarq also read relatively low. Spider-based powermeters just seem to be the most responsive to quick accelerations. Which is not surprising. They are the closest to the source. There’s a reason Uli Schoberer developed the SRM as a spider-based unit and that remained the gold standard – and may still be the gold standard – for accuracy. The chain deflecting the spider is how power is actually applied to the drivetrain. Everything else is further removed. Some of this is self-serving, certainly. I like that my Quarq tells me I’m stronger than the Rallys do. But I also trust my Quarq data because, over 15 years, it’s been incredibly consistent, and also matches up well as compared with what elevation analysis and the simply static torque tests reveal it should be reading. I’ve also owned a lot of Quarqs over the years, and they’ve all matched up with each other. Pedal-based power measurement is hard. You have two devices that need to be reconciled against each other in real time. This is not trivial. Ultimately, I don’t think this really matters, though. The Quarqs are accurate. And the Rallys are accurate. But I do not think they are transferable. Pedal-based powermeters are amazing for portability. If you have a MTB and a gravel bike, something like the Rally makes a lot of sense. If you’re a data geek, and you just love all that information – regardless of utility, the Rallys are amazing. But for me, especially trying to focus on the ecosystem as a whole, I found they were hard to integrate alongside a Quarq on my road bike. 

I think this is where the heavy restrictions Garmin places on treating all disciplines as the same is really the biggest miss. If I could have a different FTP on my MTB than on my road bike, which seems entirely reasonable – specificity is a thing, then I think I would have used the Rallys much more. If I do decide I want power on my MTB, most likely as a requirement for use with a Flight Attendant-enabled fork, I will likely choose to use a Quarq. My power numbers are Quarq numbers. Trying to mix measuring devices and disciplines just proved ineffective. The lack of power universality  is also plainly obvious with running. I have a Stryd footpod, and I think it’s reasonably useful in certain scenarios, mostly hill training. I also think it’s reasonably “accurate,” though the precise meaning there is certainly more nebulous than with cycling. But at the very least, I found my running FTP was fairly close to my cycling FTP. Which makes sense. And which jives with other endurance sports. My rowing FTP is lower still, but still within range. Current higher end Garmin watches will estimate power from the wrist. I found this number to be useless, as it was entirely out of line with anything that seemed reasonable – i.e. doing 400w+ on an easy run. Now, maybe if I had nothing to compare it to. But knowing both what Stryd had said and what I felt was reasonable just understanding physiology, I couldn’t comprehend that power numbers it was reporting. I promptly disabled this and essentially never again thought about it after day 1. I don’t really think that running power is a “thing,” and my experience here confirmed that. Perhaps further proof that with power, you need to pick a single system and stick with it.

Now, having opted out my MTB rides from my cycling fitness evaluation and having opted out my trail runs from my running fitness evaluation, it might seem like I was dealing with a hamstrung system. But I actually found it to be quite the opposite. I think that the granularity of daily VO2 measurements was possibly noisy. And eliminating certain activities allowed for a smoother picture of fitness that was easier to interact with. My training data seemed very accurate. During a period when I took a week off from work and did a lot of training, Garmin warned me I was overreaching. Tapering into XTerra Victoria, Garmin quickly recognized that I was shifting back and forth between Recovery and Peaking. Ultimately, I came to very much value the insights that the Garmin ecosystem was offering. 

Easy Really Should Be Very Easy

The biggest sign of the system’s utility was that I explicitly changed my training in response to what Garmin suggested. For easy runs, Garmin suggested a much lower HR – 125bpm – than what I would have otherwise considered. And I found those runs to be much more rejuvenating than ones that seemed only marginally harder – say 133bpm. 

Garmin’s Daily Suggested workouts follow a similar theme of being useful suggestions, but not necessarily prescriptions. Interestingly, for base workouts, they simply prescribe a duration and suggested HR. No warmup. No cooldown. Early on, I would choose to do these, but stopped after I got tired off my watch “alerting” me that I was not in the proper zone 1min into my run. If you do want to use the suggested workouts, start them once you’ve properly warmed up. Weirdly, interval workouts do have a suggested warmup and cooldown period, though they are – in my opinion – unreasonably strict. There’s no concept of a progressive warm-up or cooldown, which is unfortunate because I think the fundamental suggestions are sound. I ended up using the suggested workouts more as reminders to not just do base and low aerobic. In particular, combined with the very useful load distribution chart – which categorizes your prior four weeks of training into three buckets – Anaerobic, High Aerobic, and Low Aerobic, I found this to be incredibly useful for getting back into race fitness. This is again where TSS falls flat. TrainingPeaks does give you insight into time-in-zones, but Garmin’s three zone system is very simple. I had fallen into a habit of doing almost all low intensity work, and I noticed a dramatic fitness boost especially from incorporating more “high aerobic” work. This is what really impressed me the most about the Garmin system. I did sense real insight. There were some maddening parts as well – if you are a triathlete, it offers both bike and run suggestions, but only assumes you ever train one sport in a day. Now, Garmin does offer proper “training plans,” but with a busy job and a young family, I like the flexibility of having a loose schedule. And so the suggested workouts are nice. But it would be nice to see the system be a bit more responsive to doing multiple sessions in a day. As seems to be generally true of AI systems, they work best as a junior assistant. 

When The Data Is All You Have, Garbage Is Especially Bad.

As with any system that is entirely reliant on data, bad data is a problem for this system. This is where I wish Garmin offered better manual overrides. Nowhere is this more true than with swimming. While the 965 does measure HR while swimming, it admits that it’s only semi-accurate. If you want to get good HR data, you must use either the Pro strap of the Tri/Swim strap from Garmin. I did not – and I’m still undecided about wearing a HR strap while swimming… – and this is certainly the biggest miss in my evaluation of the system. My swimming load was generally very low, as is typical with optical HR sensors, when they are off, it is almost always that they read too low. Even during hard swim sessions, I’d often get a final average heart rate of barely above 100. And during threshold efforts my HR would register in the 120s or 130s. This meant swim workouts got dramatically undercounted in terms of the load they applied. I think if you really want to rely on this system as a triathlete, the swim-specific strap is a must. But I think it also shows the inherent weakness in a system where data is all there is. Wonky power or HR data can cripple such a system. The auto-detect max-HR feature worked fine, regularly reporting that my max HR is about 180. But when I wore the 965 – without a strap – during XTerra Victoria, the run data was wildly inaccurate, reporting that my average HR was approximately 190+ bpm for the entire run. For two weeks after this, after every workout, Garmin would constantly tell me that based off of historical data, it was changing my max HR to 196. I eventually disabled the auto-update maxHR feature as well.

In addition to struggling with HR accuracy, I also found lap counting to be another case of almost-but-not quite. I would say almost 100% of my swims the 965 would miscount a length or two. This was simultaneously impressive and incredibly frustrating. That the watch is properly able to identify send offs and stops with near stopwatch accuracy is remarkable. The fact that it randomly will decide that I did a 375 instead of a 400 was also super frustrating. I did learn that you should always check the compass app for accuracy before starting a swim, and do the figure-8 as you would with your phone to calibrate it if it’s wonky. This alleviated almost all of my swimming woes. And swimming LCM, the Garmin is essentially perfect, but in a SCY pool, I found that almost every swim it would short me a length here and there. Did this really matter? No. But what was so frustrating here is that Garmin offers you zero tools to correct this. Want to edit that 375 to be a 400 in Garmin Connect? No can do. There are numerous forum threads about this with Sisyphean solutions that involve various third party sites to do FIT file editing. I just ended up adding a drill block in at the end of my workout to add the extra 25 or 50 back in so that my count would be correct. I could have certainly ignored it, but I suspect I’m like most triathletes in terms of being neurotic enough that this is simply not an option. Again, it’s 99.9% accurate. But in some ways being so close almost makes the random dropping of a 25 here and there feel worse. It’s like, “why that rep?” But I can acknowledge that I’m only nitpicking because fundamentally, the system really does just work and counts and times your laps with incredible precision without you ever once needing to touch a button. Which is remarkable.

Overall, the system being so good means it’s incredibly reliable and useful over the long run. Individual outlier data does eventually get smoothed out. But I think that also magnifies the times that the system doesn’t work. One night, my watch got positioned badly, resulting in an abysmal sleep score, which then drastically reduced my apparent training readiness. I just ignored it, but it was another reminder that these quantified self-devices are there to help you make good decisions, not to make decisions for you. The system mostly does just work. But I don’t think you can just cede control over your training to it. The Garmin ecosystem was at its most useful when it was just another data point – or points – that I was able to meld with experience in order to keep my training both enjoyable and productive. Your watch can’t know if some days you just need to let it rip. And some days you just need to chill. Though I did find it remarkable that sometimes it actually compelled me to be honest with myself and to actually do those things when maybe I hadn’t really thought I was up to it. While it mostly succeeded in helping me go easy more often, there were also some times when I used an indication of high training readiness to let it rip, and those workouts – though they were few – were always good.

My Two Favorite Features – Heat Acclimation And Self-Assessment

The two features I actually came to enjoy the most appear to have no particular impact on the larger system, though I think they can and should. The first is the Heat Acclimation score. This would have been incredibly value when I was preparing for Kona or other hot races. The score is based on time training above 22C (which honestly feels a bit low to me), but overall, I found it to match up extremely well with my own experience around adapting to the heat. For workouts in warmer weather, it will tell you how much that workout increased your relative heat acclimation (out of 100%) and your overall acclimation. What’s especially interesting is how quickly it would dissipate. This gave me some solace about my 2013 DNF in Kona, when I missed doing my normal heat training block in the leadup to the race as I was sideswiped by a car and had to take a few weeks very easy to recover. I didn’t think I lost too much fitness, but I ended up overheating early in the bike and then dropping out on the run. Seeing the quantification of that heat training data on the 965 made me think back to that time in the heat that I missed and how quickly my acclimation would have faded. And how much time it takes to come back. The data here isn’t as good as what I think you get from CORE – or, perhaps, from the Epix’s Elevate 5 sensor that also considers skin temperature, and it also doesn’t account for humidity or the additional thermal load of something like riding a stationary trainer, and yet I can say that once my heat acclimation score was above 50%, I was a lot more comfortable in the heat. If you are preparing for a hot race, using this as a guide to make sure you are properly adapting to the heat would be very useful. I actually bought a Garmin external Tempe sensor – since discontinued – to get temperature data on my watch back before the altimeter (which also provides temperature data0 was standard on the Forerunner series. But actual heat training response is orders of magnitude more useful. While I think temperature is necessarily reflected in training load, I did think that Garmin could do a better job of accounting for this in terms of training status. If the weather suddenly turns hot and your VO2max, by default, drops due to being less fit in the heat, that doesn’t mean that training suddenly is Unproductive. This is where only using VO2max as a measure of fitness falls short. I hope Garmin figures out how to incorporate the heat data more broadly, as I think it is a miss to have it exist essentially as a standalone metric as it does now.

Interestingly, my favorite feature of the 965 appears to have not actual impact on anything. Though I found it to be incredibly useful as a habit builder. And that’s the post-workout RPE self-evaluation. After a workout, you score the RPE on a 1-10 scale from very light to maximal. And then you give a self assessment about how you felt on a 1-5 score from very weak to very strong, indicated by smiley (or frowny) faces. I love this. And the utility of this is well established. Self-evaluation – both in the moment and over the long term – is incredibly insightful. And, critically, it forces introspection. I found myself being more honest. And then I found myself using those evaluations to make decisions about whether or not to do a second workout. Or, having decided to do a second workout, how hard to make it. This, more than anything else, is my favorite feature of the current crop of Garmin watches. I’d love to see this data be presented in a more usable way – in particular, how has my 1-5 subjective eval tracked over time. But it’s only available currently on the individual workout screen.

The Ecosystem Hub – The New Garmin Connect

Thankfully, the data is there, and it’s just a software update away. And this brings us to Garmin Connect itself, the hub – newly reimagined – for all this data. In a running theme, Connect still has an almost-but-not-quite feel to it. Notably, the web app and the phone app have wildly different UIs. Finding data in one place on one app does not mean you will find it in the same place on the other app. There were also some very weird decisions about what is permanent. I have not played a round of golf in over 20 years. I have zero interest in golf. I do not own a Garmin Approach watch. I do not want to think about golf in any way. And yet Golf is a permanent and fixed section of the primary menus on both the web and mobile apps. I can’t view my long term RPE data but I’m forced to think about downloading golf courses. Does this really negatively impact my experience? No. But at the same time, I felt it highlighted the frustrations I had with needing all of these clicks and taps to view my training data and then thinking, “why is it one click to download a golf course?” Especially coming off the big overhaul, this felt like such an obvious miss. Pick your sport/athlete type and then just tweak the UI accordingly. It just felt like it was designed to undermine Garmin’s credibility with endurance athletes. For as amazing as the system is, it’s things like this that just make it harder to really trust.

I also think that Garmin is in danger – as Strava was as well – of trying to make Connect too many things. It’s added badges and challenges. I got a recent email from Garmin letting me know I could “have more fun with Connect!” Garmin has recently rolled out some straight up copy-cat Strava features that I just don’t think make sense. I understand that Garmin wants an ecosystem, but it can’t be all the things. I think Strava has wisely walked back – or at least de-emphasized – many of its features that seemed designed to compete with Facebook and Twitter. I don’t think Connect needs to replace Strava. While Strava does dabble in training data – and I do consider it dabbling, it’s not their core product. And while maybe some of the social features Garmin is introducing into Connect will likewise be “dabbling,” I wonder if those features are more meaningful than, say, the ability to remove Golf from your home screen…

Overall, my criticisms of the Garmin ecosystem are minor. And if history is a guide, the system will only continue to get better. Garmin’s track record of near constant and continuous improvement is exemplary. Having worn the 965 for over six months straight, only taking it off to charge – which is rare, as it has incredibly long battery life, I can say that I have found it to be an incredible ally in managing family, work, and training for my first triathlon in seven years. In that time, I certainly had my frustrations. But as someone who has worn nearly every revision of the Forerunner, from OG 201 up to this latest and greatest 965, seeing the evolution of not only the Forerunner as a watch, but also the Forerunner as part of a system designed for endurance athletes has been remarkable. When you buy into a system, a device becomes more than its specs and list of features. I arrived at the start line – and then the finish line – of XTerra Victoria fit, healthy, and happy. Most of that was the result of experience. But some of that experience was directly informed by feedback and information provided by the Garmin ecosystem. When Garmin first started incorporating FirstBeat data into its analysis of its user’s training, it became an instantly different company. Suddenly, it had opinions. I set out to discover, after nearly 15 years, whether any of those opinions were any good and worth listening to. I was initially very skeptical that it could teach me anything new, but I was open minded to the idea. And after half a year, I can say unequivocally that I believe it can help you make better decisions. I am even more convinced that you need to be the one making decisions; do not hand over the reins fully to these systems. They are not a replacement for a coach. But they are also not inherently worse. They are different. A coach comes with accountability. That is the most valuable and important thing that a coach offers. But that also comes with a cost and with potential downsides. Garmin is easy to ignore when you want to. There are countless memes about all the ways in which your Garmin is judging you. But I think it’s more trying to “care” for you. It just wants what’s best for you! And sometimes, I think it’s right.

The post The Garmin Ecosystem first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

Even the most well-intentioned athlete can fall victim to some of the most common mistakes with their training. It’s all too easy to get caught up in the details and miss the forest for the trees. It’s important to take a step back, eliminate emotion and bias, and evaluate your training at face value every once in a while. You might find that you are making one of these all-too-common mistakes. The good news is, though, that once the mistake is uncovered you can make adjustments, and improvements will be soon to follow!

1. Doing Too Much Too Soon

One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is doing too much too soon. It usually comes with good intentions because when you start a new training plan, you’re highly motivated, and letting that motivation lead your training routine feels natural. 

Unfortunately, motivation ebbs and flows, and when your motivation starts to wane, you won’t be able to keep up with the aggressive training routine you’ve set. In fact, doing too much too soon can be the exact thing that leads you to burn out and lack motivation.  Fatigue, an inability to keep up with your other responsibilities, and an overly busy schedule, are all unsustainable things and will eventually lead to roadblocks in your training routine. 

Finally, doing too much too soon can also lead to injuries and illness which will plague your training, prohibit you from making improvements, and ultimately diminish your motivation as well. 

2. Inconsistency

Inconsistency is probably the single largest training mistake that I see people make time and time again. A lack of consistency will prevent you from making improvements and make it very difficult to get into a rhythm. It’s ok if you can’t train every day, but the best thing you can do is set a plan that works for your schedule and stick to it. Once the plan becomes a part of your routine, you’re much more likely to see it through. Improvements take time and so you need to be able to stick to a plan long enough to watch your improvements materialize. 

As you develop your training plan keep in mind that it’s always better to train for short amount of time frequently than for a long period of time once in a while. If you only have 3 hours per week to commit to training, it’s better to complete 4x 45-minute workouts than one 3-hour workout. 

3. Not Fueling the Work

When you start to increase your training, you’ll need to increase your caloric intake as well. Your body won’t be able to support your training, and definitely won’t be able to make gains, if you are restricting your fuel. It’s important to listen and honor your body’s hunger response, especially when you start or increase your training. Carbohydrates will be your best friend to fuel your training during and between sessions. Don’t forget about the ever-important macronutrient, protein, because protein will help you build muscle and improve your recovery. 

4. Pursuing Too Big of Goals

It’s great to have big hopes and dreams that you can aspire to for long periods, but it’s almost important to have smaller, timely, and realistic goals that can drive you from day to day. If your goal is too big or too far off, an athlete can quickly become discouraged. It’s too easy to feel like you won’t get there or like what you’re doing isn’t enough. When you have smaller, more bite-sized goals, you get rewarded by consistently taking steps toward the goal and even checking the goal off of your list. 

5. Monotony

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”

is a quote often credited to Albert Einstein. The body needs novel stimulus in order to make improvements. Make sure that you are switching up the types of training you are doing so that your body is forced to adapt and respond. In addition, mixing up your training will keep things interesting and keep you more engaged with your workouts. Don’t get sucked in to doing the same thing every day. 

You Got This

Even though there are numerous pitfalls you can make when starting a training routine, the biggest error you could commit is never to start at all. Begin by congratulating yourself for taking a step toward your goals, then hone in on the specific ways you’ll get there. 

The post 5 Training Mistakes to Avoid first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

As the weather starts to warm up and seasons shift, events are already full swing. Looking at the calendar, you may be starting to count down the months or weeks until your event. You’re finally thinking about a goal you set a long time ago, long before the magnitude of the undertaking set in. Now, you’re looking the goal square in the eyes and wondering what it’s going to take to cross the finish line. Here are some guiding principles you can use to structure your training, to make sure that you feel ready on race day.

When To Start Training

It’s never too early to start training, but there are some things you should consider when you build your long-term plan. When you look at professional athletes, they train for years and years to perfect their craft. The cumulative load their bodies endure season after season surely boosts their abilities, and your body is no different. The longer you spend honing your abilities and training, the stronger, more durable, and faster you will become. That said, not even professional athletes train year-round, without taking a break.

As a coach, a common pitfall I see amateur athletes make is to build their training hours too early leading into an event and to find themselves burnt out months before even toeing the line. If you’re eyeing a long event like Unbound, Leadville, a marathon, or an Ironman, you want at least 6 months of training (24 weeks) before the event. If you have more time than that, that’s great! Use it, but make sure that you plan some rest as well. Before the 6 months to go mark hits, take about 2 weeks off of training to let your mind and body recover so that you are ready to push all the way until your event. The last thing you want is to burn out a month before your event and to be forced to take the time off then.

When To Do Your Longest Workouts

If you hit your longest workouts out of the gate, you not only might not be ready for them, but you have nowhere to build from there. If you are training for one specific “ultra-endurance” style event you’ll want your longest workouts to fall somewhere around 2 weeks before the event. You can plan your training in reverse by planning your longest workout for 2 weeks before the event at 60-80% of the duration of the event and then back out from there. Each week should only build about 10-12% in volume throughout your program and don’t forget about recovery weeks as well!

I find that a lot of athletes start to panic around 3 months until race day. At 3 months out, you suddenly realize just how challenging this goal may be. For example, if you’re training for a marathon and you complete a 15-mile run, you may suddenly wonder how you’ll ever be able to do 11 more miles. Don’t fret! Three months is longer than you think and you’ll chip away at that goal little by little.

When To Start Your Taper

The reason that you do your longest workouts 2 weeks before your event, is because after that, you start to taper! A two-week taper is a conservative approach that should allow you to shed most, if not all, of your training fatigue without losing too much fitness. Those two weeks should have a decrease in your training load by about 60-90%.

Don’t fall victim to a common taper mistake of missing out on your nutrition. When you begin to taper you will be burning less calories so you may initially need a little less food, but don’t cut back so far that you are in a deficit. Taper time is not the time to lose weight. We don’t want our bodies to be working extra hard. Instead, we want to give our bodies everything they need to be successful. Try keeping your protein intake about the same during your taper and adjusting your carbohydrates according to your needs. Remember that 3 days before your event you may need to start carbo-loading as well. GoodLife Norwegian skin-on salmon and rice or Piedmontese ground-beef and pasta are two of my go-to meals.

Plan a Practice Event

One of the best ways to feel ready on race day is to plan a dress rehearsal. About 8-12 weeks before your main event, plan a practice event. This event should be shorter and “easier” but still allow you the chance to practice your preparations. For example, if you are doing a marathon or Ironman then you may want to register for a half in preparation. This practice race isn’t a time to set PRs, instead it’s a time to simulate exactly what you will do on the day that counts. Use your race equipment, practice your pre and during event nutrition and hydration strategies, and most importantly shake out the nerves!

Plan Ahead

The most important thing you can do in your training for your big event is to plan ahead. Don’t leave questions or difficult decisions for race day. That’s a recipe for stress. The goal of training is to prepare both the mind and body for the demands of the race. Leave no rock unturned so that when it’s time to race, all you have to do is have fun. Training is the hard work and racing is the reward.

Hannah Otto (formerly Finchamp) is a professional mountain biker and gravel racer. She’s the winner of the 2022 Leadville 100 and a 2023 Marathon World Cup Winner. Before her professional cycling days, Hannah competed in the sport of triathlon for 11 years. Hannah also holds a Bachelor of Science degree in both Athletic Training and Exercise Science, she is a Board Certified Athletic Trainer and USA Cycling Coach and has been personally coaching athletes since 2017.

The post How to Structure Your Training for a Long Event first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

As I wrote in my last article, our family spends every weekend and holiday period from the first weekend of December until the last weekend in March at the mountain. Our daughter has wanted to be a ski racer since she first got on skis at three years old, and has now progressed to a fully fledged speed demon who, at 7, nearly beat me through gates. (Sidebar: I thought I’d have a lot longer to be faster than her. Think I have maybe one more year left.)

Now, we are the “rare” ones in our program in that we don’t own a home or condo on the mountain; instead, we commute the roughly 40 miles each way every day. We manage to both be “locals” and “from away” at the same time. That said, the commute means our morning routine every Saturday, Sunday, and holiday period looks something like this:

5 AM: alarm
Next hour or so: Morning farm chores — feed and water the chickens and rabbits, clean, finish packing, ensure driveway is clear
6:15 AM: wake up Ivy (if not up already), pack breakfast / get ready for departure
6:45 AM: out the door
6:52 AM: arrival to Dunkin’ for high test coffee
7:55 AM: arrival to Stratton
8:00 AM: begin gear up
8:15 AM: on the snow
8:25 AM: programming begins

It is a lot. Rinse, lather, repeat for 18 weekends plus December and February breaks.

We do indeed love our home mountain; Stratton is owned by Alterra, the mountain collective behind the IKON Pass, which enables us to visit Eric and the Slowtwitch home offices in Utah each year while getting to ski at Alta/Snowbird, Snowbasin, Deer Valley, and more. Stratton also generally has free parking, a good village, hidden gems of terrain if you know where to look, a great patio bar (shout out to Nugget and The Drift!), and a couple of good shops if you need something in a pinch.

But, most importantly for me and this article, Stratton offers a free uphill program. Acquired at Guest Services, the Uphill Pass allows you access to snowshoe, skin, or split board your way up certain trails during daytime / lift operations hours. With the longest route at 2.4 miles and total elevation just under 1800 feet, there’s a variety of terrain options based on how hard you’d like to go and/or your tolerance for cold.

I started skinning a few years ago, in part due to being blacked out of our season’s pass. But I really focused on it more this year because I’ve got IRONMAN Lake Placid on the docket. As you can tell from the morning routine, if I wanted to actually sleep a decent amount, I can’t get a morning workout in before departure — and as I’ve gotten older, I prioritize sleep over just about anything. We also don’t return home from the mountain until after 4 PM, and I am terrible at working out late unless there’s a team Zwift race.

That leaves during the program window: 8:25 AM to 11:30 AM, and then 12:30 PM to 3:00 PM, and with the option of swimming or running at the Stratton Fitness Center, or going uphill. Now, I like the Fitness Center. It’s a saline pool, and usually kept at a good temperature. They also have lovely treadmills. It’s also $25 per day to visit. And I already spend a decent chunk of change on our Y membership. So, as they say, when in Rome…

I went uphill. A lot.

Every Saturday, at minimum, there’d be a full lap, top to bottom. The goal of any lap, for me, was to climb up and ski back down in under an hour. Most of the time, I’d get at least two laps in, alternating ways up the mountain (there are three routes that reach the summit; two from the main base, and one from the Sun Bowl). The “big” goal for the year was to be able to get three full ascents in before I needed to be back to base to pick up Ivy for the lunch window. I didn’t quite get there, turning around on the third lap 75% of the way up.

While climbing, I’d look to approach it similar to my running heart-rate zones — look to settle into my “Z1” (I use the classic ZR-Z1-Z2-Z3-MSE system), with the hardest pitches allowed to dip into Z2, unless I was trying to “race” the climb. Most often this would serve as my “long run” for the week, as the total climb times would approach 90 minutes to two hours. And fueling would be most similar to how I’d treat a run, with the majority of intake being Gatorade Endurance.

Here’s the thing that I’ve noticed, now coming back into a more traditional triathlon build with ski season ending — my running has drastically improved, particularly on the uphill. Even at my absolute peak of triathlon fitness a decade ago, I have always lagged behind on hills. I’d yo-yo away from the group I’d be running with and need to floor the downhill or flat sections to try to keep up. And now I feel like I can just grind my way through any elevation change. I think that’s due to a couple of reasons.

First: the mental component of having faced average grades of 15-18% while skinning uphill makes run hills look tiny by comparison (also filed to: you really get a newfound appreciation for just how steep “beginner” terrain can be at mountains when you climb them). Second: leg strength. Jordan Rapp once wrote that he viewed an IRONMAN run to be a strength, not speed, run. It took me a long time to understand that phrasing — especially given the speeds with which pros now run an IRONMAN marathon. But I think I get it now — you have to have sufficient power and endurance in the muscle itself. I don’t fear the legs giving out before my aerobic fitness while maintaining pace on the hills.

The final benefit, at least for me, is overall health. It’s the first time I can remember going into an IRONMAN build where my body isn’t falling apart around me. And I feel mentally ready to put in the grunt work, which will include many, many hours in my basement on Zwift. It’s not a bad place to be in heading into the 3+ month build towards Lake Placid — and hopefully, my first triathlon finish since 2018.

The post N=1 Experiment: Uphill Skiing as Run Training first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

Spring has officially started, and there’s a fresh layer of snow on the ground in Western New York. Which means we are still inside riding our trainers for the most part. However, with each passing year, indoor riding has become less and less of a seasonal, inclement weather alternative to riding outside. Even when the weather is nice, I find myself on the trainer for rides that are an hour or less. Some days, it’s simply more convenient to get a short ride completed inside.

As a result, I don’t think there is ever a bad time to consider upgrading your indoor riding setup. In the Zwift beta days, I started with a laptop on my kids’ old highchair and a Lemond Revolution dumb trainer. Each year since then, I’ve added some new piece of equipment to make the indoor riding experience more tolerable. Fast forward to today, and my setup now includes some accessories from Wahoo that you may want to consider.

Current Setups

My pain cave shares space with my teenage boys’ gaming and video streaming hang out spot in the basement. As a result, I’ve been able to justify some equipment upgrades that improve both their gaming experiences and mine on Zwift. For example, we recently upgraded to a more powerful gaming PC and 4K televisions, both of which were significantly marked down as open box returns after the Super Bowl. Zwift in 4K is cool, and so are Fortnite, Elden Ring, and (as of today) Rise of the Ronin.

I have two main setups that I’ll discuss while highlighting the Wahoo accessories. My main setup is a Gen 5 Wahoo Kickr mounted on an InsideRide motion rig. I prefer this setup for longer rides because of the motion that the rig affords making for a more comfortable experience in the saddle. The Gen 5 Kickr is connected to my router with the Kickr Direct Connect that I’ll discus below.

My secondary setup is a Wahoo Kickr Core Zwift One with a Kickr Climb. I prefer this setup for rides with climbs and for gaining more experience with virtual shifting in Zwift. The Kickr Climb approximates the tilt angle of the climbs in Zwift, which is closer to what the actual experience is pedaling on those gradients. The Kickr Core has the Zwift One freehub body installed, and I’m using the Zwift Play controllers to shift the virtual gears.

A third setup I will only briefly mention is the InsideRide E-Motion Smart Rollers that I use occasionally in the winter months when I’m burned out on the other two setups. They are the best rollers I’ve ever used, but I don’t use them as frequently likely because they require a bit more concentration and diligence than the other two setups.

Wahoo Direct Connect

No Drops. That’s the single and best thing I can say about this accessory. The Kickr Direct Connect hard wires your trainer to your computer or router with an ethernet cord, resulting in a steady and reliable connection with programs like Zwift.

There are many reasons why you may be experiencing dropped connections in Wahoo X, Zwift, or other indoor riding programs. Mike Hanney of Zwiftalizer has a video detailing 18 different issues that may be the cause of dropped Bluetooth or ANT connections. Chief among these potential issues is that your space may be overcrowded with competing devices broadcasting over Bluetooth and ANT. This certainly describes my basement with the many controllers and wireless headphones we have competing with one another.

The quickest way for me to cut through all this noise for a reliable connection was to use the Wahoo Direct Connect for my Gen 5 Kickr. Unfortunately, the Direct Connect is not compatible with the Kickr Core. However, I have found using the Zwift companion app as a connection bridge has decreased the number of dropped connections. I can’t remember the last time a data drop effected my ride or race on Zwift.

The Kickr Direct Connect has an MSRP of $99.99 and may be worth it to save you in-game frustrations. Combined with Kickr Race Mode, you will have the fastest and most reliable connection for racing on Zwift.

Wahoo Headwind Fan

This Headwind Fan works as a regular fan and a smart fan. The smart aspect of the fan is that it can be paired with your trainer speed or your heart rate. Because speed doesn’t have a direct relationship with effort, I prefer to have the fan paired with my heart rate for cooling purposes. Although, if you prefer the fan to stop as soon as you are done with your ride, then you may want to pair it with your speed.

I like having the steady stream of variable air from the front, but I find it’s not enough for cooling. The air stream is easily obstructed by the Climb or if you have a wide towel on the handlebars. I try to aim my fans at my torso. Prior to receiving the Headwind Fan for review, I was using a remote-controlled Vornado fan. I now use both, which has prolonged my indoor riding and helped to prevent fatigue related to overheating.

You’ll have to decide if the smart features of the Wahoo Headwind Fan is worth $299.99 MSRP. If not, then you may want to consider a remote-control fan like the Vornado for the sale price of $99.99 on Amazon.

Wahoo Kickr Climb

I don’t use the Kickr Climb as much as I thought I would or maybe as much as I probably should. I tend to avoid the hilly routes and events on Zwift. However, I used it on the Zwift Alpe today, and I do think it makes for a different riding experience than without it. There’s something to riding at the approximate angle you would if climbing those gradients. When tilted upwards you are applying pressure differently in the pedals, and maybe that’s a significant adaptation to riding similar climbs outside.

More than anything for me, the Kickr Climb presents some variety to indoor riding, which I sorely need if I’m doing countless days of indoor riding without getting outside. However, at $699.99 MSRP, you’ll have to decide if the novelty or climbing adaptation tool is worth the investment.

Wahoo Desk Stand

The Wahoo Desk is the accessory I didn’t think I wanted, but I am sure glad I have. Before I was using a makeshift platform that I mounted on a microphone stand to hold my wireless keyboard, phone, and remote controls. Now the desk neatly holds all those items. I attached a power strip to one of the table legs and did my best to tidy up all the cables, including the charge cord for the Zwift Play Controllers.

The price of $299.99 MSRP may not be what everyone is comfortable with when it comes to a desk for indoor riding. There are certainly comparable DIY and cheaper alternatives if you look around. I don’t like that the three-wheel design of the desk makes it pivot on the center wheel. However, the desk is designed to be compatible with the Headwind Fan, so that make things easier in tight spaces.

Wahoo Floor Mat

Well, there’s not much to say about a mat. The Wahoo Floor Mat looks cool with the Wahoo and Kickr logos. The foam also has good memory, meaning that when you step on it with your cleats or leave your trainer on it for a long time the impressions left go away over time. The same isn’t true for my other, cheaper foam floor tiles. The MRSP is $79.99, which may make this more of an accent accessory rather than one that will significantly improve your indoor riding experience. Then again, if your goal is to accumulate all things Wahoo, then you may want the Wahoo Mat to complete the set.

Maybe Not All At Once

Collectively, these accessories add up quick. However, you may want to consider upgrading your indoor setup gradually across the indoor riding seasons or years. Riding indoors just isn’t the same as the joy of riding outdoors, no matter how many toys and tools we come up with to make indoor riding more tolerable. However, these toys and tools help keep nuancing the indoor riding experience and maybe even keeping us on the bike a bit longer than without them.

The post Wahoo Pain Cave Upgrades first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

Last year, Zwift introduced virtual shifting through their rebranded trainer, the Zwift Hub One. The idea behind the Hub One was to lower the cost and technical barriers to virtual riding on Zwift.

Virtual Shifting in Zwift

Virtual shifting involves the smart trainer changing resistance to approximate 24 gear ratios. The virtual shifting is controlled by a handlebar remote, the Zwift Click, and with a firmware update (rolling out Feb 7 and 8), the Zwift Play Controllers.

Virtual shifting eliminates the need for a cassette on the trainer, replaced with a single speed cog, which can accommodate any drivetrain (8-12 speed) and component group. This change drastically reduces complexity for entry-level consumers and opens up the possibility of a trainer being easily shared across bicycles with different drivetrains.

Virtual shifting is not new. The Wahoo Kickr Smart and Shift Bikes have customizable virtual gears that change the bike’s resistance from the buttons on the levers. These virtual gear changes are made within the hardware of the smart bike.

What is new is bringing virtual shifting to an entry-level trainer and allowing the Zwift game to control the virtual gear changes of the trainer.

Updated KICKR CORE

The Wahoo KICKR CORE has been updated to support virtual shifting, and is now being offered in a Zwift bundle on par with with the Zwift Hub One at the $599.99 pricepoint. Branded the Wahoo KICKR CORE Zwift One, the entry-level trainer comes with the Zwift Hub One, the Zwift Click, and a one-year subscription to Zwift allowing new consumers to use virtual shifting right out of the box.

Current KICKR CORE users can update their trainer’s firmware to enable virtual shifting, but they will need either the Zwift Click or the Zwift Play Controllers to change the virtual gears in Zwift. Also, the trainer doesn’t know if it is equipped with a single speed cog or a cassette, so users can run virtual shifting with their current cassette setup.

Zwift offers a Cog + Click upgrade kit for $79.99 for the Zwift Hub trainer. However, the freehub of this kit is not compatible with the KICKR CORE, so current CORE users will have to (1) wait for Wahoo to offer their version of the Cog kit, (2) disassemble the Zwift Cog to move the single cog and guides over to the CORE freehub, or (3) buy a third-party single speed conversion kit that is compatible with their current setup. Again, that's not necessary, though, because virtual shifting works with a cassette.

The Zwift Play controllers at $99.00 (during the Beta period) may be a better investment, as they will control virtual shifting (by Feb 8) and allow you to steer and brake in the game.

Wahoo & Zwift Moving Forward

Zwift put a great deal of time and resources into lowering the cost and technical barriers to virtual riding on their gaming platform. The $600 price point for a smart trainer including a one-year subscription to Zwift has proven successful for coaxing the entry-level rider indoors to ride on Zwift. The packaging and instructions for assembling the Hub smart trainer made it very easy for the non-technical user without any bike tools. The Hub One and virtual shifting made it even easier for setup and bicycle compatibility. However, Zwift’s foray into smart trainer hardware has proven to be more trouble than it’s worth for the company.

Therefore, with the KICKR CORE update to virtual shifting and pricing on par with the Zwift Hub One, we will see Zwift phase out their smart trainer after selling off the remaining stock and defer to Wahoo for all things hardware. This seems to follow their current trajectories of returning to their original lanes of Zwift focusing on virtual riding software and Wahoo focusing on smart trainers, bikes, and now a treadmill, KICKR RUN.

With the recent layoffs from Zwift that included mostly the hardware team and the Co-CEO resigning, we see this product development as a continued team-up with ZWIFT and WAHOO bringing both brands together not only in the virtual world but in your homes. For us at Slowtwitch, this shows that both companies continue to strengthen their books and bring out the best in one another.

Old Habits

The Wahoo KICKR CORE Zwift One is as easy to setup and ride as the Zwift Hub One. Assembly only requires attaching the two legs and choosing the correct axle adapters. Zwift provides an assist to Wahoo with this process adding their own easy-to-read instructions and video.

I have found the quickest and most reliable way to pair devices in Zwift is through the Zwift Companion App. The Companion App serves as a bluetooth bridge for the KICKR CORE and the Zwift Click. For whatever reason, I get less connection drops through the Companion App compared to connecting directly to my gaming PC.

One habit that will take me some time to break is using my shifter levers to change my gears mechanically instead of the Zwift Click to change my gears virtually. When I make this mistake, nothing terrible happens. One mechanical click in either direction is not enough to derail the chain from the Hub One single speed cog.

Also, the plastic guides are as tall as the teeth of the cog, which reduces the likelihood that an unnecessary mechanical shift will derail the chain. For now, I just have to remind myself to use the Click. However, in the future I think reverting to old shifting habits will be lessened by the Zwift Play controllers updated to virtual shifting. Having the buttons closer to your shifter levers will be helpful for retraining the brain for virtual shifting.

Minimalism

I keep in mind that the KICKR CORE Zwift One is targeted toward entry-level riders with the idea that reducing cost and complexity will lower barriers to participation on Zwift and other virtual riding platforms. However, I can’t help but to wonder what other possibilities virtual shifting opens up.

I’m not alone in owning multiple bikes and reserving the least expensive one for indoor riding. I built up a used, aluminum Allez Sprint with mechanical Ultegra/105 11-speed for riding indoors (and occasionally for airline travel). This bike remains mounted on a Wahoo trainer for most of the year. And when I’m riding it, I wonder why I bother having brakes installed on it. Now with virtual shifting, I’ll be wondering why I even have a drivetrain installed on it. I could get as minimalistic as a crankset and a chain tensioner. Which led me to thinking I could just mount my track bike with the Velobike adapter I already have on hand. Fixed gear with virtual gears? I mean, why not?

All this geekery aside, virtual shifting eliminates the need for a bike that mechanically or electronically shifts gears, and could, in theory, further lower the barriers to participation if all you need is an inexpensive bike with a chain tensioner to ride on Zwift.

I like where this is going.

The post Wahoo KICKR CORE Zwift One Launches first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

Written on the Slowtwitch Reader Forum in 2018: “Heart rate is only a surrogate for the power zone. It can be affected by hydration, fatigue, caffeine so it isn't as helpful as just training by the power zones determined by your FTP test.” That was one of many posts reflecting the mood of our readers. Heart rate was old school. That 15-year argument was won by the train-by-power folks (certainly in cycling, and even in running there’s a strong train-by-power contingent). If you were foolish to argue on behalf of HR somebody would post saying the 1980s called and wants its training method back. But…

That antiquated and vanquished arbiter of effort – heart rate – is rising from its grave.

The heart rate (HR) apologist would concede that heart rate is affected by temperature, humidity, fatigue, hydration. But that apologist would point precisely to this as the reason you use HR as a gauge of effort, in a workout and in a race. Heart rate is the absolute measure of fatigue. Not of power. And not of blood chemistry. But fatigue as measured by HR is a close analog to blood chemistry.

Here’s the converse to the power argument: HR is not derivative. It is not a contrivance. It does not need to be normalized for weather conditions. It does not need to be calibrated. It does not vary based on the quality of the tech and the manufacturer. And there’s another factor requiring normalizing of power, which we’ll get to. It isn’t as if athletes are throwing off power and rushing to heart rate. More like there’s a gradual reentry of HR into the training regimen, because power alone has occasionally led athletes to less-than-ideal outcomes.

“The metrics I currently use are power, HR, Moxy, lactate and RPE, wrote Lionel Sanders to me last week. “I would say they all have value if you are able to properly interpret the data. I did not wear HR for most of the early part of my career, but I now wish I did so that I could look back and interpret that data better. I still think power is excellent, and I use it every day in training. My screen that I use when riding (both intervals and easy) has three metrics: lap time, Moxy data, and lap average power. I don't really use HR much during practice, but I do log it and use after afterwards in analysis to get a better sense of what the intensity actually was, and my readiness and recovery level going in, and how stressful the session potentially was.”

“I think I’m probably in a bit of a transition,” wrote Taylor Knibb when I asked her. “I would say that I train a lot with power, to make sure I’m getting the right intensity and achieving the aim of the session. My new coach has me take lactate measurements and also looks at heart rate to confirm that.”

Looking at “heart rate to confirm” lactate measurements. What does that mean? We’ll get to that in a moment.

Lactate is for sure the hot metric right now for the highest-level athletes. But real-time lactate isn’t typically something an athlete uses during training all the time. You use it to establish your training zones, such as AT or MLSS (depending on the system you’re using). A lactate step test is not pleasant – neither the workout nor the 5 or so times you puncture your skin. Once that test is done you know your lactate threshold and the goal is to increase that threshold (the work you can do before your blood lactate increases beyond a certain point) which is also system dependent but is generally between 3 and 4 millimoles per liter. Now that you know your threshold your training program (of your choice) has you do X number of workouts at lactate threshold, Y number of workouts below that, and Z workouts above it.

But you aren’t measuring your lactate continuously during your training, so you use a proxy metric to tell you when you’re in the zone you want to train in. Heart rate or power is that proxy. The problem with power is that it is variable, depending on the platform and activity. By “platform” it’s your stationary smart trainer and any difference in power meter model across your bicycles. By activity it’s that your average power during (say) a mountain bike ride may be different than during a road bike ride if performing that ride inside a given zone is your goal.

Beyond that, challenging atmospheric conditions ratchet down your capacity to perform. We know this. Part of that is reflected in your lactate threshold, which is reduced as temperature goes up. Over the course of my reading it appears to be reduced as temperature goes down as well (due to vasoconstriction). The one arbiter that always tells the truth is HR, which is a reliable reflection of lactate accumulation. But HR is a little laggy. Still, it's laggy only by a few seconds and the literature thinks it's a close analog to lactate accumulation. In sciency terms the heart rate deflection point (HRDP) pretty reliably tracks with lactate threshold. You can actually figure out, on the cheap, what your lactate threshold is by paying attention and trying to identify your HRDP. There’s a protocol for this and you probably have heard of it. It’s the Conconi Test.

For some in triathlon who came from activities other than cycling heart rate remains an important, and perhaps preeminent, metric.

“To add some context to my thoughts I only started cycling in 2015 and 16 and was using power almost immediately,” wrote Kat Matthews to me. “However, I have been running since I was a child and training to heart rate. So, heart rate has always been my benchmark for everything, always reliable (especially in the early days of less reliable power meters).

“I do bias HR over power on most days, especially when training fatigue is heightened. I will always have power targets in mind but it is HR that controls the session, aerobic hours and higher intensity, e.g., I go into a session aiming for 320w in a HR range of 170-180 but if my HR is holding at 170 then I go harder and if it creeps above 180 I ease off, regardless of the rep power.”

“For aerobic [non-interval] rides I will have average HR showing on the computer as well as average power and again I will have a personal goal for power but if my HR creeps up too much I will ease off. The third factor I use is RPE, in a way to triangulate these [other two metrics]. In racing, all the above applies, the same as training.“

Lionel Sanders looks at HR after the workout, but power is preeminent during the workout. Kat Matthews looks at power during the workout but HR also, and HR is preeminent. Which is better? I don’t know. If you normalize your power number based on your HR, that argues for Kat’s approach.

Jordan Rapp splits the difference, relying on HR at low-intensity efforts and power for high-intensity workouts. "I'd say HR for low intensity and lactate for high intensity. And power is basically just there to serve as a proxy for lactate because it's really inconvenient to do lactate testing in the field.

"I do think heart rate has certainly come back into vogue. I mean, I never – literally, never – wore a heart rate monitor from 2005 until like 2014. And even when I did, it was kind of useless to me because I was so grounded in pace and power. But now I do care about heart rate more because I've come to see how it fills in some of the gaps.

One way to look at it might be to imagine your car’s engine. It produces X amount of horsepower. You can make it produce that horsepower by simply stepping on gas pedal and maybe your best visual gauge in your car’s cockpit is your turbocharger’s boost. You can drive around just looking at that boost number and step on the accelerator enough to keep that boost pressure at 20psi. But you also have gauges that reflect the stress on your engine. Lactate accumulation is your oil temperature. Heart rate is your coolant temperature. If you insist on training to your boost and ignore the temperature gauges outcomes are predictable and if it’s hot outside both your car and your body will overheat. Then your “boost” will go down regardless of how hard you mash on the pedal.

When real-time blood lactate measurements become ubiquitous in the endurance training world, HR will have a new metric with which to compete. Until then, if you ask the 1980s nicely it might let you use its training metric.

The post Heart Rate Makes a Comeback first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

The Wahoo Kickr Run is not your low-end, $700 dollar treadmill. The only thing about this treadmill that is in the same ecosphere would be the red emergency stop cord – which isn't even available on every $700 treadmill.

This treadmill is large, bulky, and sturdy. It will take more than 2 people to move it and it will probably break your toe if you run into it. It's clearly built to last and it’s clearly not for the consumer that is looking to spend $1000 or less.

It’s been interesting to listen to some of the feedback from our community about “another $5,000” treadmill. “My treadmill cost me $700 and it works just fine.” I'm not here to argue with that. But I'm not going to “buy it” either.

I personally cringe when I hear about a $700 treadmill. And it has nothing with money. It has everything to do with the quality of that treadmill. I travel a lot for work. Over 1/3 of my year is spent on the road in hotels. There are two things that I look for when I'm traveling and picking a hotel. Number one, I don't really like wall mounted air conditioners in rooms. Number two, I always figure out what sort of gym equipment they have.

Gym equipment is important because I'm not sure when I will be able to get in a workout. It may be at 4am or it may be at 10pm. I'm not ever really sure. So while my favorite thing to do is go for a run and explore the city I am in, about half the time I find myself in some sort of hotel gym. That means I find myself on a treadmill.

And when I find myself in this situation, which is a good 60+ times a year, there is nothing worse at that moment than a treadmill that sucks! It’s like getting ready to go on a bike ride and finding out you have a flat and there’s no tubes or sealant to save you, or your electronic shifting is dead and you can't find your charger. It’s that crappy feeling you get when you step on the belt and you start to run and it’s already slipping or you are afraid you are going to wake up someone because it’s so loud. That’s it: your dreams of a run workout at that moment or during that stay are now over.

Now, if you have a treadmill that you paid $700 dollars for and you’re stoked on it, I am happy for you and please accept my pure joy for you in finding one that works. But this is not that sort of offering from Wahoo and it shouldn't be compared to it.

When you look at the features that Wahoo provides here and is trying to introduce to the marketplace, I don't want these things to be cheap, I want them to work. And for the most part, what I saw first hand is that they do just that. They work, and they work really well. I watched countless people walk, jog, run, and really run on the two treadmills they had in Boston. I watched all sorts of different runners, their form and their speed saw people sort of freak out (in a good way) at how responsive the new treadmill is. And that’s both manually and within Zwift creating a much more realistic running experience.

I tell our partners all the time. Triathlon is the hub for all endurance sports. If you want to launch a product in the endurance space, triathletes are the target market. Whether you like it or not, triathletes will give you all the necessary feedback you will need to be successful outside our little section of sport. So knowing that two companies – Wahoo and Zwift – that really understand triathletes working together on this project tells me they have a lot of time invested in the “What if’s.” It was also just good to see them working together again.

I, personally, didn't end up running a lot on the treadmill. I was only in-town for about 5 hours and I didn't want to take two slots and have someone that was a potential customer that wanted to run on it lose out. I did however take a 15 min slot to get on the treadmill a little and do some filming of it.

I'm a little disappointed that we have to wait so long to even order this – the beginning of summer is an odd time to get a new treadmill. But I appreciate Wahoo’s reasoning on generating buzz and seeing what initial interest will be. Now the company will know how to pivot into mass production and when to start ramping up – which they claim they can do very quickly.

The post Wahoo KICKR Run = Slowtwitch Approved first appeared on Slowtwitch News.