Each week I try to review and reflect on my previous week on the bike. This allows me to see how my fitness and ability is progressing on a wider timescale than day to day. For previous weekly reviews please click here.
Quite a frustrating week, truth be told. I’ll get to why later in this post, but it’s not just one issue.
Actually, one issue caused another, and one of the issues may cost about a thousand pounds or more to solve… or I could just leave it? However, it has led to injury, so is it worth the risk?
This week’s rides were as follows:
- Tuesday – Working Off The Meat
- Wednesday – 4wk FTP Booster Week 1 Day 1 – HIT 80% FTP #1
- Thursday – Getting Away With It
- Saturday – Bad Mood Bear
There were rides on Sunday, but they weren’t the usual thing. I’ll cover them below.
The week started fine. Both Tuesday and Wednesday’s session were on Zwift.
It should probably be stated that, by and large, I have no technical issues with Zwift. Sure, there are rides with the odd technical hiccup, but mostly the platform just works. Could it be better? Undoubtedly. But then, what product couldn’t?
I repeated the Norseman Workout #3 to kick start the week which went fine. And on Wednesday I did another Zwift workout that was intended to be a bit more than recovery, but not quite as intense as one of the Norseman rides, or an SST session – my typical mid-week fair.
The critical thing, and I don’t really get how or why it’s happening – but I’m not complaining as such – is that Zwift accepts the numbers coming from my Favero Assioma DUO pedals. It uses those numbers and it, somehow, communicates them to the Tacx NEO in a way that ERG mode works as expected.
Wahoo SYSTM
OK, so this is where things start to get interesting.
On Thursday I went back to the Wahoo SYSTM. For those who don’t follow along, Wahoo SYSTM is the successor to The Sufferfest. I believe Wahoo bought the platform out. It’s basically still The Sufferfest with a bit of a rebrand and some new / tweaked content, to the very best of my knowledge.
I’ve been wanting to get back on this platform since I did the 4DP test on my previous trial period.
When doing the 4DP test, it is important to do the test in ‘resistance’ mode. Not using ERG mode. This is a critical thing to note, as whether I use my Assioma DUO pedals as the power source, or if I use the Tacx NEO as the power source, it doesn’t matter.
However.
It will have a massive impact on the numbers that are used after that test.
I used the Assioma pedals as my power source. The reasoning for this is simple: those are the numbers that are consistent, indoors or out.
The Problem
Where things go wrong is when using the 4DP numbers with Wahoo SYSTM in ERG mode. The problem being that, for whatever reason, that the communication that happens in Zwift of the pedals and turbo trainer just doesn’t seem to happen.
The Garmin Edge 530 head unit picks up the power as being one figure, the power in ‘game’ reports the same as on the Garmin. But the NEO / turbo does not adjust to drag the power down to the level that ERG requests.
To give an example, let’s say that SYSTM requests that I ride at 200w. Pedalling at 60rpm or 120rpm, or anywhere in the between, will lead to a power output around 220w, give or take. It’s hard to be precise on what the number is, but it’s always around 10-15% higher than what it should be.
Now, as best I understand it, this is the accurate power figure from the pedals point of view.
The issue appears to be that the figure is somehow being set by the turbo, and the two are out of alignment with each other.
It looks like this is a hardware fault with the Tacx NEO.
There’s very little I can do about this. There’s no way to manually calibrate a NEO. I’m seeing those same numbers in multiple programs, including one that I have been running some manual tests on a library I found on GitHub. That’s what all the output is from Sunday. I could set the target power on the NEO through that software, see the number reported on my Garmin, but the pedals still reported +10 / 15% higher. I suspect that’s the same software library, or something close, to whatever SYSTM and others are using. Zwift might be doing it differently.
What Now?
So on Thursday I thought I’d cracked it. I did the Wahoo SYSTEM session and I’m like 95% certain this worked. My God I wish I had tracked whatever settings I had used.
The one thing I didn’t see, during that ride, was whatever the target power was that Garmin was reporting. That’s annoying, as I cannot definitively say that the numbers matched.
But they seemed too.
Now, I came out of that session feeling like it was hard, but good. A worthwhile activity that felt taxing but not absolutely killer.
Feeling good about things I went with the next workout in the training plan.
This one was a real challenge. And why it was a challenge was because the numbers I was asked to hit – the ones being reported in game – were significantly lower than the numbers I was putting out according to the Garmin. An example would be SYSTM asking for 250w, and my numbers being closer to 280-300w.
It was totally unsustainable over the time period.
If it is the fact that the NEO is faulty then there’s very little I can do. I could sell it and get a Wahoo KICKR, but that would be a pain as it’s very heavy.
I could redo the FTP / 4DP test, but do it using only the NEO, which would give me valid figures for indoor workouts, but they would not be figures that I could work too outdoors.
I could do a 4DP / FTP Test using both pedals and the Tacx NEO as power sources, and that way I get the right figures for both.
But do I want to do one FTP test? No.
Do I want to do two FTP tests? Hell no!
Without somehow addressing this problem I feel I am entirely restricted to Zwift… and any other app that doesn’t care about structured training.
Why this winds me up is in trying to hit those figures on Saturday I ended up hurting my knee. It’s just super frustrating and I don’t have a clear answer.
Rant over.
Thoughts welcome.
So yeah, not sure what to do regarding stuff outside Zwift.
The thing is, I can copy across workouts into Zwift. I don’t even need to do that really. Most everything is available in Zwift – just named differently.
Is there really any problem then?
Well… yeah. It sucks to have spent £1500 on a thing that is broken.
There’s no way I will be able to get it fixed. It’s out of warranty, and even if it were in warranty the forum posts aren’t promising that I’d get a resolution.
I guess, for now, I just stick to Zwift.
Plan for the week ahead?
Well, it’s going to have to start easy as I have a buggered up knee.
I’ll look to do the Norseman workout series in Zwift, and just kinda drop the idea of doing the Wahoo SYSTM stuff. It’s not that software is faulty. I know that now.
The one other thing I’m trying to cling on to is maybe some of the problem is due to my as yet still unrepaired knackered old chain… though I doubt that a tired chain is causing a 10-15% power loss from pedal to cassette.
Just a frustrating week.