The Week in Review is a collection of both all the goodness I’ve written during the past week around the internet, as well as a small pile of links I found interesting – generally endurance sports related. I’ve often wondered what to do with all of the coolness that people write, and while I share a lot of it on Twitter/X and BlueSky, this is a better forum for sending it on to y’all. Most times these different streams don’t overlap, so be on the lookout at all these places for good stuff!
So with that, let’s get into the action!
DCR Posts In The Past Week:
Here’s all the latest posts on the site:
Tuesday: Garmin Varia Vue Front Camera/Light In-Depth Review: Worth the Price?
Thursday: Wahoo BOLT 3 & ROAM 3 Hands-On: What You Need to Know!
Friday: Polar Launches Premium Subscription Service: Says Hold My Beer
Friday: Wahoo TRACKR RADAR Hands-On: All The Details
YouTube Videos This Week:
Here’s what hit the tubes over on the You of Tube, definitely don’t forget to subscribe there to get notified of videos the second they hit!
Stuff I Found Interesting Around The Interwebs:
Here’s a not-so-small smattering of all the random things that I stumbled on while doing my civic duty to find the end of the Internet:
1) Rucking Support on Instinct 3, Fenix 8 Public Beta’s: The Fenix 8 got this in public betas a number of weeks ago, while the Instinct 3 just got it this week. This allows you to set pack weight. However, keep in mind this won’t change calories or other physiological metrics, since, in theory, those are accounted for via higher heart rates with more weight. I say ‘in theory’, because while that might be true, muscular impacts aren’t taken into account (e.g. a 20kg pack adds a ton more impact to your legs), but then again, muscular load has never been accounted for in Garmin’s training status related metrics.
2) Latest Polar Journal Tackles Rucking Calorie Burn: This is their online magazine of sorts, and is surprisingly good, usually with tons of research-backed links. In this episode, there’s an entire article that refers to the previous item of pack weight and vest weight. Go forth and…enjoy reading.
3) A New Tarrif Gap for Sports Tech? Quite possibly. We’ll have to see once people can make sense of this latest twist, but it could provide an opening for sports tech to not have dramatic price increases that have already begun. Of course, it’s unlikely this will keep new products from being introduced at lower/planned prices, given the uncertainty of what might come. Companies are already choosing to launch at higher prices. Virtually all Bluetooth/WiFi/Cellular enabled watches and other tech would be covered by the new order.
4) Google Rolls out Loss of Pulse Detection Feature in the US: This was approved by the FDA back in February, and will detect if your pulse stops, and automatically alert emergency services. You’ll need to opt-in to this, to get started.
5) Very very very old GoPro’s reused for bird watching: That’s some crazy dedication to making these old cameras work.
6) Tweaked Fat Bikes vs Amsterdam Police: While this is in Dutch, you can get the vast majority of it via the automatic YouTube subtitle translation option. Notably, on this day of testing bikes, they tested 250 fat bikes, and about 35 of them were modified to exceed the limits. And yes, the Amsterdam police have an on-staff vlogging officer, with half a million subscribers. Seems like a pretty solid community outreach ROI if you ask me.
7) Power Data from the Women’s Tour of Flanders: I love me some real pro race power data, and this breakdown doesn’t disappoint.
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With that – thanks for reading!
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Are you doing a Core 2 review soon?
I’ve got one, and started using it…so it’s vaguely in the pipeline now.
My impression is the only difference is really in the attachment mechanism. The CORE 1 got a firmware update and they are otherwise now functionally the same. Is there actually any internal sensor hardware difference?
I saw you featured in a video by a Spanish reviewer discussing the Suunto Zonesense, and the results weren’t very positive. Are you planning to publish anything about it?
It’s also on my to-do list somewhere. But yeah, basically, I agree with everything there.
Not really sure what more there is to say that wasn’t covered there already, but certainly want to draw attention to it.
Where can we view this video?
Here ya go (in Spanish): link to youtube.com
As someone who has been riding fat bikes since long before e-bikes were a common thing, I think we need a different name for those things. You will basically never see something with 27×4 or 26×5 tires with a motor on it, and those are the common tire sizes for real fat bikes. In my area, I’ve seen a lot of what I refer to as “motorcycles that happen to have bike pedals” going 25+ mph down recreational bike paths, and sadly, our police don’t GAF. It’s really obnoxious.
Yeah, I agree. It’s sorta a sucky situation where proper fat bikes (like your profile) got overtaken by this hybrid beach cruiser with big tires and a big motor.
> but then again, muscular load has never been accounted for in Garmin’s training status related metrics.
And therein is one of several reasons why the Garmin metrics training status metric is worse than useless.
It also doesn’t take into account multiple workouts in a day or segments of a brick workout. They are also based on fractional VO2 estimate which itself is not accurate to more than +- several % in the best case where you have a chest strap, max HR, and weight all set correctly. These metrics are really a relic of a different time.
Which watch manufacturer correctly accounts for muscular load?
I am curious. Would you rather have no wearable derived parameters or something more accurate? But if so, how do you want something more accurate without valid baseline parameters (accurate heart rate/weight)?See, that’s one of the things we teach our residents when we teach them invasive hemodynamics or any other physiological test. You have to put in the correct parameters like weight/ height/ hemoglobin etc. into the equations, otherwise you need not bother with the rest… but maybe you have a solution and it is much simpler… until then, I am quite happy with my wearable and take the measurements with a pinch of salt. Cheers!.
I would be satisfied with getting rid of the productive, unproductive, detraining, peaking judgment labels based on excessively simplistic algorithms. Also load within a multisport workout or even a day should be cumulative not treated when evaluated rather than as multiple independent events. Running after a hard “productive” bike shouldn’t say “unproductive” because it didn’t understand you were in a multi-stage workout. Or doing doubles is generally messed up. Doing zone 2 work doesn’t go with the algorithm that is designed around threshold and above for VO2max detection.
These are serious flaws.
I have actually put my Garmin account into “paused” mode for years to make those cards go away because they are just so bad and frustrating.
@Brian Reiter Then just switch off/hide the elements that you do not like. I ignore/de-activate training status and just look at the raw metrics like load (I am ok with the decay – still somewhat arbitrary but close enough) etc.
Not sure what your point is on multi-sport activities. The total load clearly is cumulative. What other implementation/presentation have you seen/do you have in mind?
Polar seems to, but I don’t have one. At least, they have a leg readiness test. If their hardware was better, I’d buy one to try. Or, if it had a proper flashlight, I swear that’s the only saving grace for Garmin nowadays (for me).
Re the tweaked fat bike video, here’s an article set in Marin County, home of mountain bikes, about rich high school students modding throttle/Class2 ebikes to go 40+ mph.
link to sfchronicle.com
Probably not the best place to ask this, but I’m hoping for some help.
What’s the best smart bike/app combination that simulates outdoor riding?
The catch: We want nothing that hints of competition or structured workout or a training plan.
Use case: My wife has MS. She used to run all the time. As things progressed, we got a treadmill. Now there is a risk of falling on that, so we gave it away.
A smart bike eliminates the risk of falling – and we don’t want a bike on a trainer, as we want to easily adjust it to fit both of us.
We’ve looked into Peloton, but that seems to be aimed at “workouts” – including instructors that try to “encourage” riders. That doesn’t work with MS patients. They can’t just push harder.
I haven’t tried Zwift, but watching everyone ride past you and see others perform better than you is not helpful to someone with MS whose signals from brain to legs just don’t make it there sometimes.
We just want something that changes resistance naturally from time to time like going up and down hills outside – and bonus points if we can throw a scenic video to the TV that is on the wall.
Our old treadmill could do this (via a terrible tiny little android screen) and our elliptical can do this without the scenic video – hence the TV on the wall. While the risk of falling on the elliptical is very small, it aggravates an old stress fracture from 6 years ago that the orthopedist warned would never heal 100%.
Any advice? Monthly subscription for the app is OK – preferably one that allows two users for one price.
Thanks for the input.
Tim: You might check out Rouvy. One can adjust the difficulty and there are thousands of routes with video from around the world. I have ridden some of the courses in real life and the resistance/scenery are very realistic. You can get different accounts: link to support.rouvy.com
Jim
Maybe something like Kinomap? Where you “simply” reride a video recording of an outdoor ride?
The platform does more, but if your only use this one feature?
There are other similar services available, if I recall correctly the Tacx app has a similiar ability for example (but I might be mistaken).
Yeah, I’d say Rouvy, or also FulGaz (now bought by Rouvy, but operating mostly separately).
Seems like Amsterdam has a lot of these electric motorcycles riding on bicycle/pedestrian infrastructure. No wonder they have a whole police crew just managing enforcement for that topic. Where I live in Ohio, the problem that grinds police gears is unlicensed off-road motorcycles and four-wheelers taking over intersections, doing wheelies and other reckless driving. Police here are absolutely not worried about overpowered ebikes and I’ve even seen a few where someone has jerryrigged a gasoline engine onto a bicycle.
In bigger cities, like Amsterdam, there’s a restrictions on some bike paths for mopeds. I believe within Amsteram it’s roughly the ring road (I’ve never had a moped, so don’t pay super-close attention to exactly where the lines are).
The signpost graphic is missing a couple of days, “Funday,” and “Raceday.” I think you should add them
This is probably the oldest graphic on the DCR site…from I’m guessing a decade ago. 😂