Tech

I needed a way to track my Endless Pool workouts, so I built one. I mentioned this briefly in my race report about this year’s Ironman 70.3 St. George, but for the past few weeks I’ve been swimming in an Endless Pool, since the Teton County Rec Center’s lap pool remains, alas, closed for the foreseeable future. It’s been an effective training tool, but one of the annoying things about it is that it’s hard to track my workouts—there are no “laps,” so all I can do is time-based sets, and even then, I have trouble keeping track in my head of how many sets I’ve done, at what pace, and for how long. So, I built myself a little tool to do this: I call it SwimSetter, and it’s a simple web app to keep track of my sets in the Endless Pool.

Using it is easy: Just bring your phone to the pool in a waterproof case, leave it on the side, open the app, set a timer or a stopwatch on your watch, and then just swim. Whenever you stop for a rest, enter how long your last set lasted and at what pace it was, and repeat until you’re done with your workout. The app will add up your total time, distance, and average pace, which you can then enter into a workout log or a manual Strava activity or wherever you want.

It’s a very simple tool that answers a very simple question for me: “Have I swam enough today?” But it might be useful to you too, so here it is.

Runna acquired by Strava. Disappointing news. I like Runna—it’s the most TrainerRoad-like running app I’ve used, and Strava is, well… they forbid their customers from disagreeing with their “business decisions” in their community forum, which probably tells you how much they care about their customers’ opinions. In the announcement post on Reddit, Runna’s CEO says they’ll continue to operate independently both as a team and as a product, but nothing in the history of corporate acquisitions makes me think that is anything but temporary. I hope I’m wrong. (Via The Verge.)

Send Runna workouts to Zwift using Intervals.icu. I’ve been using Runna since last fall for all my run training, and so far it’s been great, except for the fact that it doesn’t sync its workouts to Zwift, which is where I do all my treadmill running in the winter. I’ve been told that’s coming soon, but in the meantime, I’ve been using Intervals.icu as a middleman to send Runna workouts to Zwift. The trick is to rewrite Runna’s workouts into Interval.icu’s workout builder plain text format. It’s a bit laborious, so to make that easier, I created a custom GPT that can do that—just paste the workout description from Runna (or just upload a screenshot of it), paste the output into a new workout in Intervals.icu, and presto, it should sync to Zwift.

RaceRanger used by age groupers for the first time at Challenge Wanaka. I’ve been hoping for RaceRanger to make its way down to us age groupers now that it’s proven successful at pro races, so TRI247’s account of how it was used at Challenge Wanaka this past weekend is very encouraging; sounds like it went as smoothly as it could possibly have. I’m looking forward to it, not just for draft enforcement, but also for the possibilities it opens for improved safety, like better live tracking and crash detection. Maybe even crash prevention—imagine if you could pair one of these things to your bike computer and have it work like a Garmin Varia, notifying you when someone is passing you (that’s very pie in the sky, but hey, I can dream).

There’s still a ways to go before it’s ready for widespread usage, but this is solid progress nonetheless.

Automatic treadmill incline control may be coming soon to Zwift. According to Zwift Insider, it’s been in testing for a few months now for a small set of Zwift subscribers using the Wahoo Kickr Run treadmill, and now there’s a support article about it. Will they support other smart treadmills, like the Technogym MyRun? Who knows, but Zwift’s response, quoted in Zwift Insider’s article, makes me hopeful that they will. (If anyone at Zwift is reading this, I’d love to beta test that when the time comes.)

I’ve been using TrainerRoad for all my cycling training, with great results, since even before I got into triathlons. I love the training plans and all the machine learning magic they apply to them, but doing long workouts indoors while looking at nothing more than a graph and some numbers is mentally challenging, to say the least. Or as a certain cyclist would say: “It builds character.”

Best Bike Split now integrates directly with Zwift. I don’t think it was widely announced except on the Zwift forum, but cool nonetheless, since you can now send Best Bike Split race plans to Zwift as a workout so you can practice your pacing plan there. I’m still waiting for TrainerRoad to ship their own Zwift integration, but I think this fun St. George race simulation will keep me entertained in the meantime.

CORE introduces a new heat adaptation score. I’ve had a CORE sensor for a while but my biggest complaint has been that it’s hard to understand and act on the data it shows, so for the most part it’s been sitting in a drawer. That said, I do like this new heat adaptation score the app now shows front and center. It’s nice to have all this data condensed down to an easily digestible metric, and, unlike the heat adaptation metric in Garmin Connect, I can use it to track my indoor heat training. Now let’s see if I can get it to 100% before Ironman Canada.

Today I should be in Colorado, racing Ironman 70.3 Boulder, but as luck would have it, COVID is wreaking havoc in my house this week and I had no choice but to stay home and cancel my race. However, the day I pulled the plug on the race, my sulking was cut short by an excellent piece of good news from Open Range Cycles, my local bike shop in Jackson:

Last fall I started shopping for a treadmill so I could continue training over the winter for the races I have scheduled this year (Ironman 70.3 St. George in May, Ironman Coeur d’Alene in June, and Echo Triathlon in July), and after much consideration, I settled on the $3,750 Technogym MyRun. I don’t usually write reviews of things I buy, but while researching treadmills, I didn’t see many reviews of this particular model, so I thought it’d be worthwhile to share my experience with it, if nothing else as a cautionary tale for others who might be considering buying one.

TL;DR: It’s an awesome treadmill backed by an excellent iPad app, but unfortunately marred by Technogym’s abysmal customer support, which makes it hard to recommend.