Alien ANT+ Farm

Swapping over from Mac / OSX to Windows has turned out to be 95% success, and 5% fail. Heart failure, to be exact. Well, heart rate monitor failure.

Right now I’m not sure if the ANT+ dongle is conflicting with the WiFi dongle. It’s possible. I have a USB extension cable which I might try using to move the ANT+ dongle to put it underneath the saddle / trainer. Always something.

As such, today’s ride was partly dominated by my Wahoo TICKR dropping in and out particularly at the start and end of the ride. It was also enough to make me forget to collect the screenshots of my ride statistics. Fortunately, I can grab them from the Zwift Companion App. Frustrating though.

I don’t think it’s the fault of the Wahoo TICKR. It worked absolutely fine for the last 10 weeks or so via Blue Tooth on the laptop and / or iPad. Bit coincidental that it now doesn’t work that great over ANT+.

Fortunately, as mentioned yesterday, I have both an ANT+ dongle and a Blue Tooth dongle. I will try my next ride without ANT+ and see how I get on. Apparently Windows + Blue Tooth + Zwift has been unreliable for some. We shall see.

As I rode London yesterday, and didn’t have a huge amount of time this morning, I opted for a 15km ride around the Jungle Circuit, which I knew I could get through in 25-30 minutes or so. I was also interested to see how different the Jungle Circuit would look on my new hardware.

The Jungle Circuit is unusual in that the lead in is largely down hill. No other circuit I’ve ridden starts off this way. It’s quite deceptive. It’s essentially half down hill, half up hill.

I’m guessing it’s one of the less popular circuits, as it’s always been fairly quiet (<15 riders) whenever I’ve been on there, even on weekends.

Much like on London, the difference between the Jungle on a gaming PC and the jungle on iPad is night and day.

Unlike the last time I rode on the Jungle Circuit, I made sure this time I took it relatively easily on the lead in, and then gave it a solid effort on the actual lap itself. I only had time for a single lap, and with the Wahoo TICKR issues, I was pretty frustrated throughout the last part of this lap anyway, so it certainly wasn’t my best ride.

If anything I could have dropped a gear on this climb. At one point I stood up, and there just wasn’t enough resistance against my legs. I struggle to stand and pedal if the resistance is too slippy. Heck, I don’t know the correct terms.

I was perhaps a little too distracted taking glamorous screenshots and testing out camera views rather than putting in a solid lap. It certainly looked better than my last jolly around the jungle.

At this point I was experiencing a ton of drop outs with the TICKR. I tried re-adjusting, moving it under my top, even wondering if it was to do with changing tabs or switching out of the Zwift Companion App causing the problems.

One thing I did notice was that there was a delay between what showed on the screen and what was happening in real life. For example, at one point I pulled the TICKR away from my chest to see if it would drop off, and it took about 3-5 seconds to update on the screen.

Putting the annoyances out of my mind, I did manage to put in a new PB on the Jungle Loop. But not by much.

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With the lap out of the way, I took my foot off the gas (so to speak) and chilled for a few more km before snapping out of the pedals and hitting the shower. I still have plenty of tweaks and setup changes to make as I’m not 100% happy with the new experience.

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All in all, certainly not my best ride this morning. But better than being in bed.

I am intending to ride Saturday and Sunday. On Sunday I have the 9am Tour of Watopia Stage 6 to ride. Not sure what I’ll ride on Saturday. Ideally I will get in 30km or more, but that’s entirely time (and hardware) permitting.