We stopped some of the top gravel pros before they ventured onto tomorrow’s race course for Life Time’s Big Sugar event.

ISABEL KING

Frame – Scott Addict Gravel RC

Drivetrain – Shimano GRX 2x 48/31

Wheels – Shimano GRX WH-RX880

Tires– 45 Panaracer X1 plus

Power – 4iii

Personal touch

Daily Reminders

CHASE WARK

Frame – Lauf Seigla

Tires – Continental Race Kings 2.2”

Cockpit – Vision Metron 5d ACR integrated 3k

Wheels – HED Emporia

Drivetrain – Sram Quarq 1x 48

HEATHER JACKSON

Frame – Canyon Grail CFR

Drivetrain – Shimano Mix Dura-ace 50-34 / GRX(wants the power)

Grips – Shimano GRX

Moto – Dirt Brigade

Cockpit – Canyon Grail custom

Tires – IRC Boken 45c

Alexey Vermeulen

Frame – Enve MOG

Drivetrain – Shimano Mix Dura-ace 50-34 / GRX(wants the power)

Grips – Shimano GRX

Tires – Kenda rush 2.2 up front, Kenda prototype 50mm rear

Cockpit – Enve SES AR One-Piece

Custom – #noflats

The post The Many Bikes of Big Sugar first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

I’m really starting to discover a lot gravel these days. It all started in 2019 when I went to the old ST HQ and got on one of Dan’s OPENs. It had vast amounts of rubber tires wrapped around 650 wheels. It had been sitting outside for the winter so the SRAM 1x was all rusty looking and I think I broke like 2-3 seat bolt clamps trying to get the seat adjusted so I could ride it. I cruised around his yard for all of about 5 mins and then he came out and said, “Let’s go. I’ll take you to the trail head.”

Dan was going running, and I was going riding. He dropped me off at about 6,000 feet and pointed me in the direction of a California fire road. He was going to run for about 90 mins and I was was either going to meet back up with him or I was going to take the main road back down the hill to his house.

After about an hour or so of climbing, I ended up at the top of Jackson Flat Campground. I finally had a cell signal and so I texted Dan and told him I would meet him at the house. I had finally started to get the bike set up the way I wanted it so I figured I would put some more time in. I road around the fire roads high over the San Gabriel Mountain range looking over parts of LA in the distance. I figured out I didn’t have a lot of water with me and so I should probably start to head back. On the way down I realized just how steep it was on the fire roads. The camp round had been closed for what looked like a couple of seasons and so the roads where all sorts of “chunky.” It was at this point I remembered the story of Gary Fisher and what inspired him to make his own bikes. Insert me falling over the handlebars. OK, I’m going to lower the seat. That’s better. Once I got to the main road its about a 8-9 mile fast decent on pavement. Then it was a couple of miles of rollers back to Dans. Over the next couple of days I put lube on the chain and rode the OPEN a lot. I explored every single piece of pavement and dirt road that I could and I left Dan’s house ready to buy a gravel bike.

Three months later, I started doing some YouTube reviews here on slowtwitch. We reviewed the Argon 18 Dark Matter , the Niner MCR 9 and then the Ventum GS1. I was having the time of my life. I was testing all sorts of bikes, and I was learning what I liked and didn’t. And to be honest it was giving me something to do as COVID was starting to get weird. Then, all of a sudden, boom. Everyone started buying bikes, and the bike companies had zero reason to send us bikes to review. So a couple of years later, I still had my Ventum GS1, and I was getting pretty busy with some other things anyway. Getting back into about 2022, gravel was entering its really big peak of the crazy and we were starting to get some of the bike brands to have new things to talk about. “All Road” was the newly coined term from the big companies that weren’t quite ready to embrace what companies like Salsa, OPEN, and even Lauf were putting out. Tires and tire companies were also starting to be the sticky point. 38c was “Big” when it came to “gravel” everyone else was slapping on mountain bike tires.

So, while the industry was learning and coming around, people started returning to work, and the dirt roads became less packed. Overstocked, all road bikes were highly discounted on the internet, and small tires were all put on closeout. Five years after my first gravel ride and three years after the big companies started to really work together on bike frames, wheels, and parts, here we are, and here is what I chose to put on my gravel bike. Not what was just left around the garage — some of these parts where given to me for long-term review purposes; the rest I bought and/or traded for photography work.

Now that I have bored you with my long short story (or short long story), let’s lay the foundation quickly on this bike and the “why” behind it. The first thing for you to understand is that I wanted to build a gravel bike around a dropper post. Why? Because in good old Utah, I feel like I need and/or want one. And because of that, I want everything on this bike to be able to handle all the places and situations that drop post is going to allow me to comfortably ride. So that means massive gearing, strong frame, big tires, and a comfortable seat. Oh, and I want it to look RAD AF, too. Just like the rest of you bike geeks, the thing has got to turn heads.

DROPPER SEATPOST

This is is the foundation of the “whys” on this bike:

• Material: alloy

• Diameter: 27.2mm

• Length: 350mm

• Offset:zero

• Travel: 70mm

TIME 45 ADHX FRAME

BCS Carbon Fiber – Dyneema® Enhanced with the RTM build tech is the most robust carbon fiber bike frame on the market It’s not the lightest, but OMG, does this thing feel good underneath you, And it doesn’t have some special seat post that I can’t add a dropper post too. Just your normal, standard 27.2mm post.

SHIMANO GRX 12 Di2

Hoods. The #1 reason I will choose Shimano over SRAM is the ergonomics of the hoods. I have a Cervelo Aspero with SRAM, and every single time I ride downhill on that bike , and I want to stop, I feel like I need two fingers on the brakes. With Shimano, I don’t. I can be on the bars, going down a 30% gravel grade and I can use each of my pointer fingers and boom. I’m stopped. The hoods are 70% of my decision.

GEARING = 2x

The other 30% of my decision is gearing. 1x is excellent, but it’s not always great for everything, and unless you are going to run the new SRAM RED, chances are the front derailleur will be troublesome for you. So, while I wish Shimano would figure out power on GRX, this drive train is what I’m looking for.

FRONT GEARING

• 170mm Crank with 48 and 31 chainrings allow me to take this everywhere my riding ability can handle.

REAR GEARING

I have an 11-34t because I didn’t want to run the 105-level cassette. But I can do that later if I need that extra two-tooth range as this GRX RD-RX825 allows for a 36t cassette.

Shimano provided us this for the launch a while back, as well as long-term reviews.

POWER AND PEDALS

Because Shimano doesn’t yet feel like gravel riders care about power enough to put a meter in the GRX crank, and because I have a dropper post on this machine, I felt like I wanted an SPD-type pedal system, as it’s a lot easier to get in and out of. This is one thing I might change up a bit as I get into longer rides on this bike. But for now, it’s a power mountain bike pedal. And no, Garmin didn’t give me these. And yes, I will review these in the next coming month.

WHEELS AND TIRES

These are 100% review wheels and tires, but I also have five other sets I could have put on the bike. Reminder: I want this to act like a downhill mountain bike at particular times and places. So these new Zipp 303 XPLR with a 32mm inner hookless rim gives me all sorts of options here. Now, time will tell if these do hold up on the downhill single track I want to try to bomb, but for now, they are holding up.

ZIPP 303 XPLRSW with Goodyear 45 Tires. I also plan on doing a lot of other tire tests with this wheelset.

SADDLE

The WOVE MAGS. I owe this saddle its own review. This is by far the most comfortable I have sat my underside on. Now at $499 bucks, it’s a tough pill to swallow, but to never deal with pressure points — It’s worth it.

BAR AND STEM

This is a Discovery handlebar, and they are also part of a long-term review these feature a 30-degree flare and sweep of 5- Degree. I’m running the 42cm width on this bike.

I am also using a 100 mm Discovery Stem, ± 6 degrees.

There you have it, folks…wish me luck.

The post My TIME 45 ADHX Gravel Build first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

Now, just a reminder: to play the game, a rider must finish the race.

Equipment trends

• While Cervelo had the most bikes, Canyon took the fastest time
• Pro’s chose Shimano over SRAM, yet chose ceramicspeed over regular derailleurs
• Favero Assioma took the pedal count within the top 10
• No one in the top 10 was riding 1x
• Aerobars are no longer “Stock”

Big steep hills, fast steep descents

With an elevation gain of +8,895 ft and loss of -8,877 ft, the Championship course took a toll on some, yet 8 of these ladies ended up in the top 10 overall. Let’s start with some crazy facts from the GPX file provided by IRONMAN.

CLIMBS

With eight sections that qualified as a “climb,” athletes saw max grades over 20%

1. 6.1 mi 1,081 ft 3.6%: Starting mile 6.2 – avg grade of 3.6% and Max grade of 9.7 %
2. 0.9 mi 151 ft 2.7%: Starting mile 17.9 – avg grade 2.7% and max grade 8.1%
3. 11.5 mi 3,206 ft 4.9%: Starting mile 25.1 – avg grade 4.9% and max grade 23.3%
4. 1.1 mi 187 ft 3.2%: Starting mile 39.1 – avg grade 3.2% and max grade 4.1%
5. 0.6 mi 106 ft 3.1%: Starting mile 43.9 – avg grade 3.1% and max grade 4.4%
6. 1.7 mi 358 ft 4.2%: Starting mile 48.2 – avg grade 4.2% and max grade 8.6%
7. 4.1 mi 1,066 ft 4.8%: Starting mile 75.8 – avg grade 4.8% and max grade 7.6%
8. 1.1 mi 203 ft 3.1%: Starting mile 90.3 – avg grade 3.1% and max grade 5.1%

DESCENTS

With seven sections that qualified worthy of a “descent,” athletes saw max grades of -12.1%

1. 4.2 mi 687 ft -2.7% Starting mile 20.9 – avg grade -2.7% and max grade -4.4%
2. 1.4 mi 268 ft -3.1% Starting mile 40.2 – avg grade -2.6% and max grade -4.5%
3. 1.2 mi 391 ft -6.1%: Starting mile 53.5 – avg grade -5.9% and max grade -8.6%
4. 7.1 mi 1,774 ft -5.5%: Starting mile 68.7 – avg grade -5.5% and max grade -12.1%
5. 0.9 mi 147 ft -3.8%: Starting mile 79.9 – avg grade -3.8% and max grade -4.7%
6. 7.7 mi 1,766 ft -3.9%: Starting mile 82.3 – avg grade -3.9% and max grade -9.4%
7. 10.4 mi 1,950 ft -2.9%: Starting mile 91.7 – avg grade -2.9% and max grade -10.8%

#1 Laura Philipp: 5:02:25

• Speed Machine: Canyon Speedmax CFR
• Drivetrain: Shimano with SRM
• Aerobars: Canyon Custom
• Wheels: Swissside Disc / 800 front
• Pedals: Wahoo Aero
• Ceramicspeed rear hanger: Yes

#2 Kat Matthews: 5:05:46

• Speed Machine: Canyon Speedmax CFR
• Drivetrain: Shimano 2x
• Aerobars: Canyon Custom
• Wheels: DT Swiss Disc, 1100mm front
• Pedals: Wahoo Aero
• Ceramicspeed rear hanger: Yes

#3 Marjolaine Pierré: 5:12:27

• Speed Machine: Cervelo P5 (2019 Model)
• Drivetrain: Sram 2x
• Aerobars: Stock
• Wheels: DT Swiss ARC 1100 Disc / Arc 110 front
• Pedals: Favero Assioma
• Ceramicspeed rear hanger: Yes

#4 Chelsea Sodaro: 5:15:14

• Speed Machine: Pinnarello Bolide
• Drivetrain: Shimano 2x with SRM Crank
• Aerobars: Most
• Wheels: DT Swiss ARC 1100 Disc / Arc 110 front
• Pedals: Shimano
• Ceramicspeed rear hanger: Yes

#5 Nikki Bartlett: 5:17:42

• Speed Machine: Cervelo P5 (2019)
• Drivetrain: Shimano 2x w/Rotor Crank
• Aerobars: Drag 2 Zero
• Wheels: Rolf Prima Disc / Rolf Prima EOS front
• Pedals: Look Keo
• Ceramicspeed rear hanger: No

#6 Marta Sanchez: 5:18:00

• Speed Machine: Cervleo p5 (2019)
• Drivetrain: Shimano 2x
• Aerobars: Custom
• Wheels: Hed Disc/ Speedsix Ultra light front
• Pedals: Favero Assioma
• Ceramicspeed rear hanger: Yes

#7 Penny Slater: 5:18:36

• Speed Machine: TREK Speed Concept
• Drivetrain: Sram 2x
• Aerobars: Drag 2 Zero
• Wheels: DT Swiss ARC 1100 Disc / Arc 110 front
• Pedals: Shimano
• Ceramicspeed rear hanger: No

#8 Lotte Wilms: 5:22:02

• Speed Machine: Strorck Zeitjaeger
• Drivetrain: Shimano 2x
• Aerobars: Sync Aerobar One
• Wheels:  Xentis Mark4 5-spoke
• Pedals: Favero Assioma
• Ceramicspeed rear hanger: No

#9 Merle Brunnèe: 5:23:44

• Speed Machine: CUBE Aerium
• Drivetrain: Shimano 2x / Rotor Crank
• Aerobars: 3D printed
• Wheels: Citec disc/ 83 Front
• Pedals: Favero Assioma
• Ceramicspeed rear hanger: No

#10 Daniela Bleymehl: 5:23:50

• Speed Machine: Scott Plasma 6
• Drivetrain: Shimano SRM
• Aerobars: Rad Sport Ibet
• Wheels: Princeton Blur 633 Disc Wake 6560 Front
• Pedals: Shimano
• Ceramicspeed rear hanger: Yes

The post IMWC Nice: Women’s Top 10 Finishing Bike Splits first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

Hannah Otto is an ex-triathlete who discovered her love for riding dirt more than swimming and running. If she isn’t taking on some crazy adventure on the trails, she is coaching her athletes and inspiring the world’s youth. She is no stranger to podiums, including the top step at the Leadville 100 MTB Race in 2022. Hannah is a bit of a bike geek, too, so when we had the chance to show off her new build, we took it. The new Pivot Vault features a frame weight of 995g, tire clearance up to 50c, an integrated Tool Shed compartment in the down tube, and the ISO Flex system around any 27.2mm seat post. (more on that below) The two noticeable differences are the abilities for Hannah to choose wider tires (which she did), and she has gone from Shimano Dura-Ace 2×12 speed Di2 to Shimano GRX 1x Mechanical. Let’s dive in.

TIRES

Tire choice on dirt is almost as important as how many carbs you need for race day. Now, even though Kenda sponsors Hannah, and so not all the options in the world are available to her, she still has plenty of them. With that said, she is on the new Kenda Prototype 700x45c (We need to get our hands on some.)

COCKPIT AND CABLES

Because she is riding mechanical 12-speed, she will have some extra stuff up front. But look at that clean cockpit! Even the sticker agrees with me.

DRIVETRAIN

While we are still waiting on Shimano to get with it on their 12-speed 1x Di2 (or lack thereof), we see plenty of pros and consumers proudly running mechanical. Hannah’s drivetrain specs include a 170mm GRX crank with a 48 Wolftooth chainring, 4iii Power Meter, GRX Rear Derailleur (RD-RX822-SGS), and a Deore XT Hyperglide+ 10-51 rear cassette. Pedals of choice will be Shimano Dura-Ace. Note that we are seeing most gravel pros switch to the SPD-SL and or road platform instead of the SPD and/or off-road.

CLEAN AND AERO

Besides the little derailleur cable saying hello, the bike looks mean AF from the front. The GRX hoods are mounted on an Easton 90 SLX bar: 40mm and Easton EC90 AX Carbon Stem: 90mm -7 with an integrated computer mount called the ICM system for the Coros Dura she is running. There is still plenty of space for more tire width. She is also running a Smanie Apex Carbon saddle.

WHEELS AND HUBS

The DT Swiss GRC 1100 DICUT features a 30 mm high carbon hooked rim and a 180 DICUT hub with ceramic bearings and a claimed weight of 1298 g. She is also running 160mm rotors front and back.

ISO FLEX

What is it? Think of your seat post as being surrounded by a pivotal (see my pun) insert that allows for the flex.

#6 is the inserted fiber-reinforced nylon sleeve, which allows #2 (the clamp) to hold the vertical position while allowing “Flex” aka damping. I don’t know how really awesome this works. I think I need to see it in person, in my opinion.

QUESTIONS I HAVE

Knowing this new frame geometry is more relaxed, I wonder if Hannah will consider adding a front suspension fork for next year’s Leadville MTB Race. Will the girls follow the guys? She for sure has the bike-handling skills to do it. Also, is the ISO FLEX really that great, or is it marketing fluff? We plan on following up on these two things for sure.

Big thanks to photo pro Forrest Dalmer for the sweet pics.

The post Hannah Otto’s New Pivot Vault Shimano GRX 1x Mechanical 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.

I didn’t expect much when I agreed to give Canyon’s new cycling shoes a go. My everyday shoes for road riding are Shimano S Phyre and it’s hard to improve on those. But my new everyday road cycling shoes are Canyon Tempr CFR and I’ll tell you why they work so well for me, but let’s start with a paragraph about the development of this shoe.

Canyon looked to Eric Horton, former design chief at Giro (we talked to Eric when he was at Giro), and Carl Bird who ran equipment at Specialized for the last 10 of his 23 years at that company. These two joined forces during the pandemic and started a design firm called Form8ion, and it was here that the Canyon Tempr series took shape.

There isn’t a vertical lineup, as in, the cheap model has 2 velcro straps, the midrange 1 velcro and 1 BOA, and the top a pair of BOAs. There is just the top-level shoe. Just the double-BOA closure scheme and there’s both a road and an MTB version.

I guess I think Bont started something when it brought its more rigid inline skate boot style to cycling. The S Phyre borrows a bit from that motif. Some cycling shoes don’t open or close very much in my experience and my Shimano S Phyre road shoes are like that. The Tempr CFR does not share either of those design motifs. Its upper is softer and in that way is more like Shimano’s comfort-focused SH-RC702 (RC7 for short). The Tempr CFR is extremely forgiving, with a lot of range and what I mean by "range" is this shoe's ability to fit a wider and narrower foot, high and flat arch, with the same shoe model.

But it isn’t just the softer upper material. It’s the choice to join the left and the right sides of the upper with an elastic fabric and that’s missing in most cycling shoes. None of my road shoes have this design. They’ll have a tongue between the left and right sides of the upper, like what you’d see in a running shoe (the RC7 has this). Or, one side of the shoe simply overlaps the other. I believe some triathlon cycling shoes might’ve used an elastic piece like this, tho rooting around in my workshop has failed to produce an example. This elastic seems to me to make this more of a universal shoe, fitting a wider range of foot types.

My first ride in the Canyon shoe felt a little strange. The next day my feet hurt. I’m not the only person to whom I’ve spoken that had this experience. After my second ride my feet didn’t hurt and since then it’s been clear sailing. This has been my go-to road shoe since that second ride and I think that – while the shoe is forgiving – my feet have become less as I’ve “seasoned.” My feet are more easily insulted now by footwear. I have Joe Biden’s feet. This has narrowed my choice of available cycling shoes.

More on this: When you put this shoe on your foot has a lot of room. This shoe has very good volume, in height and in width, for reasons described above. As you tighten the BOA closures the designers of this shoe have done a nice job handling with the excess material. I think Canyon does this a little better than Shimano (though I’m still a fan of the RC7). When the closures are tight the shoe is snug but without any puckering or bunching of excess material.

These shoes are available in Euros sizes 39 to 48, half sizes from 40 thru 47. They fit true to size. Cleats are 3-hole native and as you see they accept an adapter for Speedplays.

Advertised are “Custom” Solestar® insoles but – in the spirit of “words mean things” – no, they are not custom, as they are not molded to my feet as are my Sidas or Footbalance (actual custom) footbeds. These are production. But they are good footbeds and I have not found the need to replace these with my customs. One last thing about these footbeds. They are structural. I think it's why my feet hurt after that first ride. (But only after the first ride, just as my feet are sore after my first run in a fresh orthotic.)

Advertised is a 260g weight to, for example, the S Phyre’s advertised weight of 225g. But in my (larger) size, with (identical Speedplay) cleats on, with the Tempr CFT road shoe I pay a fewer-than-10g penalty per shoe versus the S Phyre.

This shoe retails for $329.99 and that appears to be the price whether in the U.S., in US Dollars or whether it’s in Euros for those in Europe. What you see here is not an in-line color. As well as I can tell the road shoes are white and as mentioned there’s a Tempr CFT offroad shoe as well, in black. If you go to the US site and see all the sizes sold out it’s that the site isn’t live for selling yet. Give it a few days to kick start.

I only have miles in the road shoe and the photos here are not of a pristine shoe. I have about 500 miles in them, pretty hard miles, on the road and on gravel, through driving rain, 1-hour rides and 6-hour rides. (Yes, I should’ve taken my pics before I began riding in this shoe. That… didn’t happen.)

As a tri shoe: Yes, this is a viable IRONMAN shoe. In fact, I think it’s a great IRONMAN shoe because it’s not at all a hot shoe and if you find your foot expanding or for whatever reason needing a bit more volume partway through a ride this shoe would be great for that. I think it’s best as a shoe you put on in transition before you run out; attaching these to the bike, trying to get in while you’re riding, I don’t know that this is the fastest way into them. It’s not a short distance tri shoe.

By design or by sheer luck – every company needs it’s fair share of luck – I suspect Canyon has developed a shoe that works perfectly for its broad audience because of its sales model. The very best shoe for a consumer direct market is one forgiving enough to fit a range of foot styles and this shoe will absolutely do that. I’m usually a snob about brands and brand congruity. I won’t put a Felt stem or a Cannondale crank on my Cervelo bike. So much more so with Canyon, in particular because I have a beef with that brand (I stand in religious opposition to their habit of putting integrated stem/bars on their road and gravel bikes, which is a sin magnified for a consumer direct brand). Why would I ride a Canyon shoe when aboard my Cervelo bike? My feet dig the shoe. Sue me. (Or sue my feet.) Besides, wearing this shoe allowed me to congruently ride with the 2 pairs of Canyon socks that had been languishing in my drawer.

The post Canyon Tempr CFR Road Cycling Shoes first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

As a self-admitted gear nerd, particularly for running shoes, this article’s been germinating in my head ever since I decided to enter IRONMAN Lake Placid. The mission: take four pairs of shoes that I was contemplating wearing for the race, put them through a series of tests, and come away with a winner. Sounds simple, right?

The hard part was coming up with the comparison set. Some of that is wallet-related — two of the four shoes in this test were paid for out of my own pocket. But it was also trying to figure out a fair set of shoes to compare against. I respond extremely well to carbon-plated shoes, but seeing as I’m not exactly expecting a blazing run time in LP, would that be the right play?

Ultimately I settled on four options, all of them with carbon-plates, with an added criteria for slow-speed comfort. Because, well, let’s face it — the wheels are likely to come off at some point, and I’d like to be prepared for that moment.

Let’s meet the contenders. We have two entrants from HOKA — the still available Rocket X2 that put HOKA’s racing line-up on the map, and the new this year Cielo X1. Both shoes tower over the competition in physical height, although all meet the World Athletics criteria for measured stack. I purchased a pair of Asics MetaSpeed Sky Paris, as I was first shocked that Fleet Feet West Hartford even had a pair of fun shoes in my size in stock (nobody carries a 13 in anything fun) and then wowed by the try-on feel. And, lastly, I had to put old reliable in the mix: a pair of Saucony’s Endorphin Pro, but two generations old. Why not the newer ones? Because I tend to prefer lower drop shoes, and because the mid foot carve out has gotten so narrow as to be untenable for my foot shape and gait.

Before we dive in, a quick discarding of why some shoes aren’t here. Nike’s carbon shoes are so narrow under the mid foot that it aggravates some posterior tibial tendonitis symptoms. I found On to be far too harsh of a ride with a poor fit. I could not find a local shop that carried Brooks Hyperion Elite without forcing me to pay up front for it as a special order. And New Balance was out of stock of the FuelCell SuperComp Elite v4.

Let’s start comparing.

Uppers and Initial Feel

When I was working shoe floors, we used to say that the first feeling once you put on a shoe would make or break the experience. If you don’t like a shoe the second you put it on, it is highly unlikely that shoe feel is going to get much better when you start running in it. There are some exceptions to that rule — one of them in this comparison — but it’s a good rule of thumb.

Despite both being from HOKA, the Cielo and the Rocket could not be more dissimilar in initial feel. The upper on the Rocket is thinner, with a nearly non-existent heel counter that can make putting the shoe on a chore. That said, once inside the shoe, you have a typical HOKA experience: a plush, premium underfoot feel, a snug midfoot wrap, and freedom in the toe box. The Cielo, meanwhile, is a much boxier fit despite the tongue attaching to the midsole in an intended wrap. It also feels far less stable than the Rocket, with an initial giveaway — your foot sits *in* the Rocket, like most HOKAs, whereas your foot rides *on top* of the Cielo’s midsole.

The MetaSpeed came across as somewhere between the HOKA’s. The upper reminds me more of the Rocket X2, but you’re definitely riding on top of the midsole like the Cielo. Despite a nearly flat insole, the MetaSpeed also has the most pronounced feeling arch of the bunch, and it announces the most loudly walking around that it is, indeed, a carbon-plated racer. It’s the raciest feeling of the bunch — and definitely not something that screamed that it would be particularly comfortable when running in.

The Endorphin Pro reminded me why I’ve run in Saucony’s ever since the original Kinvara came to market. It follows the typical Saucony low-offset playbook: wide midfoot platform, medium arch, narrow heel, wide toe box. It’s familiar. It’s a cozy blanket on a cold winter morning; a comfort. (So, Saucony, BRING THIS BACK. Love, Me.)

Speed Testing

To test my response to the carbon plate in each shoe, I ran multiple times in each pair across what my wife and I dub “the Loop” here at the house. It’s a rolling 2.5 mile trip that includes roughly one mile on our well-packed gravel road; a mile that trends downhill on a broad highway shoulder; and a half mile stretch that includes a third of a mile hill that tops out at a 21% grade to come back to the house.

I targeted the very top-end of my “Z1” heart rate (I operate on a ZR-Z1-Z2-Z3 system) in order to drive consistency across them. Temperatures and conditions were mixed for each shoe, with each getting a run in similar weather and my personal fatigue levels based on the rest of my training.

The clear winner of the speed test was the MetaSpeed Sky. Over the rolling terrain of this course, the combination of the longer stride made available by the foam and carbon plate and flexibility of the forefoot when running uphill combined for a shoe that was, on average, 13 seconds per mile faster than any other shoe in the test. It particularly excelled on the flats and downhills, with a peak pace at my target HR of 6:44/mile.

The next two shoes surprised me, with the Endorphin Pro and the Rocket X2 tying for second place. I think that surprise came from the running experience in both; the Saucony feels a little snappier underfoot, whereas the Rocket X2 came across as a smoother run experience. That said, the Rocket X2 was a touch more difficult to push uphill with the combination of higher midsole height and carbon plate. Overall the Endorphin Pro gave me the most consistent run pace across the course, whereas the Rocket X2 would, like the MetaSpeed, give me more bang for my buck on flats and downhills but give that time back going up.

I don’t quite know what it was with the Cielo, whether it was the feeling of additional height or stability, or if I was running scared in the shoe, but for whatever reason, HR was almost always a tick higher, and pace a tick slower, than any other shoe in the test, regardless of conditions or training load. It was also my least favorite shoe to come up that hill with. It’s still faster than my baseline training shoes, to be certain — but it didn’t feel great while getting there.

Slower Speed Comfort

Carbon plate efficiency is one thing. How the shoe tolerates running at what will most likely be my IM pace on the flats and uphills is another. Because, as I said before — the wheels are bound to come off at some point (probably, oh, the corner of River Road and Sentinel Road on run lap 2). For this part of the test, I aimed for a ceiling heart rate of 140, which would typically translate out into a run pace in the mid 8s to low 9s per mile. Runs varied in distance between 7.5 and 12.5 miles in total, and may have included walking breaks on the large climbs near my house in order to keep HR in check.

This is where the Saucony shined. The shoe was comfortable at any pace that was run in it. It was also the only shoe that I did not blister in once. It didn’t matter if it was 95 degrees or 45 degrees. It also did the best job dampening the times where the town decided the best approach to managing our gravel road was by dumping as much loose rock on it as it could.

The Rocket X2 came closest to that experience, with a nearly perfect experience while running in a wide variety of temperatures and pace matching that of the Saucony’s. It, too, was also quite stable. The biggest flaw of the shoe is the gap in the heel; the number of times I got a rock stuck in that section of the shoe entered double digits on a single run. And it drove me bananas.

The MetaSpeed and Cielo were tied on this count, for different reasons. The MetaSpeed is simply a shoe that wants to run fast; the platform stability of the shoe improves at quicker paces. But it’s not something I’d call a particularly comfortable shoe. The midfoot felt harsh. There’s a *lot* of sound. And the upper is so thin, without a toe bumper, that clipping a rock when my form was less than perfect hurt so much I initially thought I’d broken the toe.

On the Cielo, the same stability issues that plagued the faster runs came up during slower ones, too. Quite simply, sitting on top of the midsole, with a narrower cut in the midfoot, just does not work for me. It also had the same issue as the Rocket X2 of jamming rocks into the heel. I think I was most shocked by this shoe overall — and mostly for the wrong reasons.

Final Placing

Fourth place was easy: HOKA’s Cielo X1 is, unfortunately, a shoe that just does not work for me at any speed. To be clear, that doesn’t make it a bad shoe; it makes it a bad shoe for me. I think if you’re someone who has traditionally liked, say, some of the Nike carbon shoes but don’t want to give Nike any money, this might be a strong solution.

Now comes the hard part. Ultimately I wound up weighting long run comfort slightly more than carbon plate efficiency. Whether that’s your choice, well, that’s up to you and your run time. With that in mind, I award silver medals to the Rocket X2 and the MetaSpeed Sky. And somehow, despite being a few models old, the Saucony Endorphin Pro wins out this round.

The post Gear Battle: Run Shoes for IM Lake Placid first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

If you have been watching this year's Tour de France, you have already seen this bike in action. But you may not have seen some of the details on this bike from us, so let’s give some quick cliff-style notes first.

Some quick history: in 2019 the latest P5 was launched with five sizes and 3 build options. Shimano Dura-Ace Di2, Shimano Ultegra Di2, and a frameset. It was a completely different mold; it had disc breaks instead of the Magura hydraulics and was one of the first fully integrated cockpits. It also was one of the first to market with an aero bottle and integrated aero top tube “snack pack” all included in the build, instead of as add-on options. It had a price point of $12,500, $7,500, and $5,000.

So, it’s been five years, and if you are like most people, you are looking at this new bike and asking yourself the same question: “What’s the difference?”

Well, let’s talk about consumer purchase options first. There are now five builds to choose from, two more than before, and they have added a sixth size, 61cm. Builds and prices are as follows:

P5 Dura-Ace Di2
Color: Black only
Wheels: Reserve 77|88TA w/ Zipp ZR1 SS hubs
Crank Powermeter: 4iiii Precision Pro Gen3+ DUAL
Pricing US $13,500 | CA $18,000 | EUR €13,999 | UK £12,000

P5 Red AXS
Color: Black only
Wheels: Reserve 77|88TA w/ Zipp ZR1 SS hubs
Crank Powermeter: Quarq Spider-based
Pricing US $13,500 | CA $18,000 | EUR €14,999 | UK £12,000

P5 Force AXS
Color: Black only
Wheels: Reserve 52|63 w/ Zipp ZR1 ST hubs
Crank Powermeter: Quarq Spider-based
Pricing US $10,000 | CA $14,000 | €EUR TBD | £UK 8,900

P5 Ultegra Di2
Color: Black and Deep Dahlia
Wheels: Reserve 52|63 w/ Zipp ZR1 ST hubs
Crank Powermeter: Quarq Spider-based
Pricing US $10,000 | CA $14,000 | EUR TBD | UK £8,900

P5 Frame Set (Black and Deep Dahlia)
Seat Post, Aero Bottle, Top-Tube Pouch, and rear bottle cage holder

What has changed besides adding a frame for the tall people and SRAM to your purchase options?

To sum it up quickly, Cervelo improved on what it missed in 2019. Let’s be honest — not much can be done with bikes to go “faster,” especially a UCI-legal bike. Simply put, companies can't, or it isn’t brilliant to go too far from the norm. Cervelo has always had one thing in mind. SPEED. You also have a company that is building bikes around the best riders in the world and asking them to ride these new bikes first in the biggest race in the world. And to be honest, in my opinion, that is really what is best for all of us. These are straightforward improvements. (Disagree? I’m sorry, but you all want something SUPER FAST, but every time someone designs it and brings it to market, all you say is ‘That bike is FUGLY.”

Now, with that said, let's look at some of those new things that Cervelo has done with the newer version of the P5.

DEEP GUSSET POINTS
If you look at the interior points of the frame, you can see the extended sections. These are designed to create a sail effect or “Pull” with the tubes and wheels, they also allow for increased stiffness where riders need it most.

TRUNCATED ENDS
It is located at the aero seatpost, seat stays, fork blades, more bottomless head tube, and down tube.

FRONT END
The bayonet reduces drag by allowing the air to remain attached to the headtube longer.

BASEBAR
A 10mm decrease in the standard level height results in a lower CDA, and a 10mm decrease in bar reach allows for less weight. There's also improved flexibility in fit, with 40mm of adjustability allows for an increased fit adjustment that wasn’t present before. (Note: to get to that additional 20-40mm worth of stack, it requires an aftermarket spacer bolt kit.)

EX14 EXTENSIONS
The aerobar fitment is compatible with all aftermarket 22.2mm diameter extensions. These extensions feature increased pitch angle – +30-degrees in 5-degree increments — and simplified assembly. The extension mount is supported in a curved cradle that rotates to adjust pitch; 0,10,20,30 degrees when the insert is facing forward and 5,15, 25 when the insert is facing backward.

TIRE CLEARANCE
This 100% has to do with the aerodynamics because it’s a massive 34mm with 4mm of ISO frame clearance to spare.

What does this all mean? At virtually the same price point as five years ago, you now have a more comfortable, faster, and even better, more adjustable bike. This bike shows that the engineers are listening to all sides of the table and bringing those improvements from every corner.

This isn’t all. We will address the specific wheels that are paired with these builds in another article. For all you lovers of integrated hydration, etc., maybe, just maybe, the PX-series will be updated. (History has shown the order of updates.)

The post The Newer Cervelo P5 first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

DT Swiss, in partnership with SwissSide and tire manufacturer Continental, have announced a new set of tires called the Continental Aero 111. DT Swiss have been working on this for about 10 years in collaboration with SwissSide. Continental was a logical partner to bring this product to market. In a recent product briefing they referred to this breakthrough as the “first aero tires ever.” Spotted on Decathlon AG2R’s bikes at the Tour de France, the tire will be available at select retailers as early as today in two sizes: 26mm and 29mm. Pricing is nearly 30-40% more than Continental’s other race tire offerings, coming in at $120.95 USD.

An important note is that the tire is intended for the front wheel only. You can put one on the back but will not yield the same benefits. This tire can be installed on any wheel since the improvements are not specifically for DT Swiss wheelsets. However, DT Swiss wheelsets and this tire have been designed together as a system. DT Swiss has options to bundle the tire when ordering their wheels.

The messaging delivered during the briefing was that it’s all about aero. Many of us think aero only applies to people riding 45km/h (28 MPH) and greater. There are properties of this wheel that make it attractive to amateurs and pros, at a range of speed as low as 30km/h (19MPH).

We will go into the benefits of these new tires. We will compare them to what is believed to be the current fastest tire, the Vittoria Corsa Pro Speed. At the time of publication, we have not yet been able to put our hands on the product, but samples should be arriving soon. In a later article, we will do an analysis with the numbers provided by DT Swiss and other sources of tire performance data. I believe that many of these claims can be tested in real world conditions.

Rolling Resistance

When discussing tire performance we tend to talk most often about rolling resistance. Sites such as Bicycle Rolling Resistance provide data on a coefficient of rolling resistance (CRR) and we can easily figure out how many watts faster one tire rolls than another. BRR data is not perfect but a good data point around which to have a conversation on performance. The recently released Vittoria Corsa Pro speed is at the top of the list. The Continental 5000 TT TR is also a top 10 contender and the GP 5000s TR sneaks in at #12.

We chose to use the Vittoria as a comparison because it’s #1. The two other Conti are used because the announcement provides no rolling resistance data but does say things such as “expect it to be between this tire and that tire” on several fronts.

At 36km/h (22.5MPH), the Vittoria will require 19 watts to roll, compared to 23w for GP5000TT and 26w for the 5000s. A 7 watt spread is considerable.

The Aero 111 tires share technology with other Conti tires, so their performance is predictable. Conti claims the rolling resistance for the tires is between that of the 5000TT and 5000S. The Aero 111 tire uses the same Black Chili compound known for its grip and rolling resistance.

If we average the two tires and compare them to the Vittoria at various speeds, we see the Corsa Pro speed still has about a 5w advantage in terms of rolling resistance.

Durability and puncture resistance are very closely related to rolling resistance. Manufacturers may choose to put less protection or make thinner tires to improve rolling resistance. BRR scores puncture resistance and gives a score of 34 for the 5000s, 33 for the 5000TT and 25 for the Vittoria. Higher is better but how this translates to the real world is difficult to assess. Continental claims the new tire should be on par with the most durable 5000s. It is based on the same Vectran technology that is both light and does not impact rolling resistance.

Aerodynamics and Performance

There have been great discussions in the forum, with the likes of Xavier Disley sharing his opinion on the trade-offs between faster rolling tires and making it through an Ironman bike leg without a flat. But 5 watts is considerable. What if the performance gap could be closed while keeping the superior puncture resistance ? Can aerodynamics close this gap? We rarely talk about the aerodynamic differences between two tires. The width of the tire and its dimensions relative to the rim are known to be a factor, but rarely have we seen data saying, “this tire in a 28 is more aero than that tire in a 28.”

This time around, it’s the biggest component of the announcement. We are also conditioned to think that aero gains are especially important when traveling at pro speeds like 45km/h (28MPH). With this announcement there are claims of substantial aero savings at speeds as low as 30km/h (19PMH).

Jean-Paul Ballard of SwissSide explained the theory of this aerodynamic advancement. Basically, if you can cause turbulence at the rim, air will “stick” to the rim and generate less drag. If you look at the tire you will see patterns that appear chiseled into the tire and these little features are referred to as “vortex generators”. They experimented with the size of these features and their positioning, depth and came to a solution they claim is just right. These features condition the airflow to achieve the desired effect.

You can’t discuss aero without consideration of yaw. Yaw is the angle at which the wind is hitting the rim/tire. 0 Yaw is head on, negative is coming from the drive side and positive from the non-drive side. The effective yaw angle will depend on the direction of travel, your speed as well the direction and strength of the wind. The faster you are going, the smaller the apparent yaw angle will be. There is a common belief that at the speed World Tour riders go, the yaw angles are very small. The reality after testing in Arizona on days with brutal cross winds, even pros see yaw. If you connect and analyze data from Kona, you will quickly see yaw is real and needs to be considered.

A great primer for the conversation is this 2016 Slowtwitch article which explains how various parties tried to assess yaw.

How you weigh the probability of seeing various yaw angles will determine how much these tires stand out. The manufacturer claims that from 0 to 10 degrees (and 0 to -10), these tires perform in a very similar way to the 5000TT or 5000s. However, at 10 degrees and beyond is where the magic occurs. Several of the sources discussed in the ST article seem to agree that on a course like Kona, a large percentage of time will be spent between -10- and 10-degrees yaw, but somewhere around 28% of the time will be above. (It’s interesting to note the outlier back in 2016 was SwissSide that claimed little time was spent above 10 degrees.)

The media kit provided some charts to help quantify aero savings. They provided data at 30km/h and 45km/h and showed “aero watts” required at various yaw angles from -20 to 20 and compared the Aero 111 and GP5000s. The two tires track very closely from -10 to 10 yaw. Beyond those points, they diverge, the Aero 111 needing less aero watts.

At 45km/h, the new tire will “sail,” providing thrust – at least, on the DT Swiss wheel. They also provided data for the wider 29mm tire at 30km/h. And there were some comparisons to other tires. Unfortunately, the Corsa Pro Speed was not one of them. At 30km/h (19MPH) at 20 deg yaw, there is approximately a 4 watt aero benefit, which is considerable at such a slow speed. At 45km/h (28mph) that turns into a whopping 17 watts gain at 20 deg yaw. To note, these numbers are visually interpolated from the charts provided.

So how much would you tend to save in a typical Ironman? That is very course dependant. But we go back the 2016 article, one source claims about 28% of the time. If we take the data provided by DT Swiss and apply a distribution of yaw angles reported in that article, we will see an average savings somewhere around 3 watts. We have closed part of the 5-watt rolling resistance gap. At slower speeds, such as the 30km/h speed, the savings in watts are less, but the probability of seeing 10-20 degrees of yaw is much greater, therefore the probability of getting full benefit is greater. When we do road tests, we will try to quantify this.

An important consideration that is difficult to put a watt count on is how these tires impact handling. Jean-Paul Ballard explained that in cases of cross wind, the force we feel that results in the difficulty controlling the wheel, is in fact the air detaching and re-attaching to the rim. These new tires, by keeping the air attached to the wheel, should result in a much smoother control, allowing us to possibly handle deeper section wheels and never having to come out of aero to do so. The claim is that you “just feel this” while riding the tires. We can do better than that: it’s something we will be able to measure on the road with a gyroscope measuring around the steering column.

A question that came up in the briefing was how tire wear impacts the aero benefit. The reply was that Decathlon/AG2R has been riding these tires for a while, and that they brought tires 2/3 worn back to the wind tunnel and saw no degradation of aero performance. They quoted that 2/3 point to be about 2500 km / 1550 miles.

Lastly, the tires work with both hooked and hookless wheel systems. They said hookless provided no additional aero benefit and the hookless testing is done entirely by Continental.

Conclusion

I have thrown a bunch of watts at you and the bottom line is how much quicker will these tires get me to the finish line and will I puncture getting there. Well, like everything thing aero, “it depends.”

First, we must see how all these numbers play out in the real world. BRR numbers are great, but they are not on real asphalt. Second, we need to see how manufacturer aero claims from the wind tunnel pan out on the road. And finally, we need to test these claims in real world wind conditions. Since starting to measure yaw on the open road, I have seen numbers higher than I was previously led to believe.

Do we have a new #1 in tire performance? Hopefully we will get a chance to confirm some of those things in the real world.

You can find the ongoing discussion about this new tire in our Reader Forum here.

Photos, Charts Courtesy of Continental / DT Swiss / SwissSide

The post Breaking Down Continental’s Aero 111 first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

For all the advances in technology in triathlon over the last five or so years, there’s one place that has seemingly stayed somewhat consistent — wetsuits. It’s been a long while since we’ve seen revolutionary changes in wetsuit design. And in some ways, that’s a good thing — wetsuit pricing hasn’t quite taken off at the rate that we’ve seen for other parts of our sport.

Wetsuits also tend to be an area where triathletes attempt to save money — either by holding onto a wetsuit that is, quite literally, hanging on by a thread for one race too many, or by ordering the current suit offered at 50-60% off “retail” price (of course, if that discount is always offered…that’s just the price, and you may want to shop accordingly).

But outside of bike fit, a properly fitting wetsuit that matches with your body might be the best investment you can make. A poor fitting wetsuit is, at best, a drag on your swim. At worst, it can impede your stroke or even be a safety hazard. Unfortunately, it’s become more difficult to shop for wetsuits; there are precious few retailers who carry a line of suits for try-on, and even fewer who can tell the difference between a suit that’s right and suit that’s available to sell right now.

That’s where sizing charts have become ever more important, but they don’t always tell the entire story. Let’s take, for instance, the subject of this review — sailfish’s One 7 Wetsuit. With nine different sizes available, there’s also some significant overlap between each size in the run. (At 6’3” and somewhere between 182 and 194 lbs depending on the day, I opted for the medium long.) But those size charts don’t tell you, say, torso length versus leg length.

I would say that, based on my experience, sailfish errs on the longer side for torso length, which means a slightly shorter leg length. The opposite fit would likely be blueseventy’s wetsuits, which are shorter in the torso and longer in the leg. With a 34” inseam at 6’3” tall, I’m pretty squarely between those options in terms of torso versus leg length — in other words, I can make both work pretty well.

The One 7 offers a high amount of buoyancy in key regions — 4.5 mm thick Aerofloat neoprene in the hips, torso, and thighs — paired with 1.5 mm thick neoprene in the shoulders and arms to give maximal flexibility. Granted, there’s no replacement for fit — any restriction in the shoulder will be amplified regardless of the thickness of the neoprene — but the arms are about as thin as anything I’ve ever put on.

Speaking of — the One 7 I find to be one of the easier suits to put on. No need for the classic shopping bag trick (unless you’re *very* sweaty when attempting to put this on); just a little lubricant and it slides up. Getting the suit into position was quite easy. It did take a minute for me to get used to the zipper; I’ve been wearing a B70 Helix for so long that all I know is the reverse zipper. But that’s a minor niggle.

Swimming in the suit and you find the Aerofloat panels do, in fact, provide the level of buoyancy you’d expect. It’s like swimming with a permanent pull buoy, which is a godsend for someone like myself whose kick consists of barely tapping his big toes together. And there’s zero shoulder restriction. Coming up on ten years since my big cycling crash, some of those niggles in the back and shoulder creep up on me, and thankfully there’s none of that wearing this suit. It isn’t as comfortable as going sleeveless — but it’s also around 3 seconds per 100 meters, in my testing, faster than going sleeveless.

The One 7 is a fast suit. It’s pretty easy to put on and live with. It should fit a pretty wide swath of the marketplace. And at $725, it undercuts other top-end wetsuits on price by anywhere from $25 to $250. That’s a hell of a deal for triathletes seeking maximum floatation help with a lot of flexibility in the arms.

Or, in other words, if you didn't swim competitively in your younger years, or you love seeing pull buoy and paddles on your swim sets — this is your suit.

sailfish One 7 Wetsuit
Price: $725
Available: Now
SLOWTWITCH SHOP

The post Reviewed: sailfish One 7 Wetsuit first appeared on Slowtwitch News.