Much, Much better. Weather’s friggin awful however, 35mph winds and horizontal rain, so stuff that for a lark – but a couple of hours gentle spinning on the turbo, FINE.
Tag Archives: hrm files
Rain (and Wind) Stopped Play…
at least outdoors. Blowing a complete hoolie all day, Horizontal rain early doors too. Bottled it, I’m not ashamed to admit it.
Dragged the Tacx out and did the last 2/3 of the 2010 Etape du Tour DVD – 79km of along and 2.7km of Up.
As I was scheduled for a “base level” ride I actually dialled the intensity of the resistance down to 50%, but that still equated to as much climbing as I’d normally do in maybe 3 of my normal daily rides – difference being, you could just “sit in and spin” on the trainer without fear of some tool on a MTB with the brakes disconected passing you doing a 1 handed wheelie and smoking with the other one!
Anyhoo – details for the ride are here on Garmin Connect this time – Strava mangles the data from the Tacx for some reason.
Interesting profile isn’t it. No – Not mine – I’m face on anyway, not in profile – I mean the yellow mountainy bits behind all the graphs.
Time for a Recalibration
So, it’s jump on the Tacx Trainer, and do a ramp test.
Then, to get my legs working again afterwards dug out an ancient Tacx DVD of the descent of the Gavia, done in 2 stages, as that’s how the ride was already segmented.
So, we’ve 3 strava sections here…
No video or screenshots, its ANCIENT, and frankly, couldn’t find anything.
The New Season Begins Here…
… or more specifically, in the back kitchen, sat on the Tacx Bushido, cranking away like a hamster on a wheel.
Started the whole thing off with a 25 minute ramptest, designed to allow the Powercal Heart-Rate/Pseudo Powermeter to be calibrated.
there’s strava links for this fiendish little test here, and a quick graph from sportstrackes below…
Sportstracks Powercal Calibration Run – Power and Heart Rate Plot
Basically, this is a 5 minutes at 110bpm then 5×3 minutes at gradually increasing heart rates followed by another 5 minutes at 110bpm to cooldown again.
The data, when dropped into the Cycleops Poweragent software should allow the “personalisation” of the Powercal belt to the specific measured power output as measured with the real honest-to-god powermeter from stages cycling.
The Second phase of todays ride turned into a bit of a Hill-Intervals session using the Tacx VR DVD – T1956.37 Milan Sanremo 2008 – I actually rode the first 50.8km of the course, and did all the minor Capi before the poggio and cipressa. Frankly, that was enough, on top of the earlier ramp test… especially as I didn’t want to end up completely spannered for tomorrow, in case the new bike arrives.
Once again there’s a Strava link to the ride here, and a plot from Sportstrack – this time showing the “virtual” ascent/descents…
Tacv VR Ride – Milan San Remo
Smiles not Miles – Week 4 Day 1
Just a “recovery spin” on the Turbo again today – still got the tail end of the high winds/rain going on, so a quick whizz around the Asda followed by a virtual ride around the lovely smooth roads near Roubaix…
Good news was my quick fix of deleting the old training runs seems to have cured TTS of it’s annoying crashing problem, and speeded it all up considerably when it comes to loading and closing down into the bargain.
Strava file is here – this time with the actual data as recorded straight from the machine’s power soak…
There’s also a route guide here
and the almost obligatory video as well
Smiles not Miles – Week 3 Day 2
Indoor Smiles/Miles today – still got remnants of the head-cold, so thought better of riding in the pissing rain outside today – plugged in the VR Trainer and had a little tootle around one of my favourite VR DVD’s from Tacx – The “Strade Bianchi”.
It was an indoor ride on the trainer – not much of a “ride report” that I can do to be honest, other than my breathings all over the shop, heart rate skyrockets as soon as I try a little bit on the “virtual” uphills, and basically, I’m way, way, way off form.
Strava stream converted from the Tacx’s HRM file export is here – no maps etc, just can’t really be arsed.
There’s a rather nice video though, to let you see what I was watching while sweating in my back kitchen…
TTS 3.9 – Finally, Something Right
Yep – it actually looks like Tacx’s outsourced programmers have extracted their collective digits and fixed a problem, without creating another one.
Today, I managed three separate rides, one a steady state ride from the VR DVD “Argus Tour 2010” – where I did a simple 6 miles of the route, pausing occasionally, deliberately stopping the wheel, and seeing if the regular “Lost Connection with Brake” message came up. Nope. Woo-Hooo!!!! Details of the ride on Garmin Connect Here.
Second Ride was one of the Ergo Rides – very strange, you follow a pro-rider or two, and the trainer gives you a resistance level that matches the power ratings that the pro’s SRM system recorded on the ride. Of course, for them it’s a nice gentle recovery spin, and for me, it would have been murder. So – there’s the option to “turn down” the wattage. I rode this demo at 60% intensity of what the Schleck Brothers did. Now – to be honest, I’d NEVER been able to run one of these ERGO videos without an almost instant crash. The entire 6 minute worked flawlessly, and I’m actually looking forward to trying some of the other ergo video’s when I get rid of this cold! Anyway – ride details via GC are here.
The Third ride was another VR DVD ride – a simple descent of the Gerlos pass, from the Grossglockner DVD. This was a cracker of a warmdown – as I mentioned above, I’m actually full of cold – and I just enjoyed the fact that the machine was stable, and I made it all the way down the hill. No crashes, no snags, no hiccups, just get on and ride. Like it should have been 4 months ago when I bought it, but it hasn’t been until today! Again, details from this ride are on GC here.
All the rides were exported as .HRM files, and quickly converted via SportsTracks3 and a couple of Plugins into Garmin compatible .TCX files, for export into Garmin Connect – I have standardised on GC for the simple reason that my last 3-4 years worth of rides are in there, so I don’t really want to abandon it…
Third part of the Indoor Etape Du Tour 2010
Managed to get the third and final mountain in this little indoor cycling trilogy “in the can” today – and surprise, surprise – as soon as I stopped pedalling, the damned software threw up its “Lost connection with Brake Messsage”
So – I bloody well ignored it, and rode the rest of the route anyway.
All in one peice, HRM file adjusted only to get the Altitude correct – apparently, Tacx export routines start the export at 300m above sea level, whatever the actual altitude is. This left today’s mountain 566M short of its true stature, and that kind of wrankles with me…
Anyway – ride report is here
Good Job I don’t crash as often as Tacx TTS Software does…
Or I’d be on the tarmac more often than Denis Menchov…
Took 3 attempts to get through phase 2 of the Tacx RLV – Etape du Tour 2010 – Col du Soulor (1474m)
They’ve at least admitted that there’s a bit of a problem with the software though – so maybe they’ll get a fix out in the next 6-7 months… yep – i’ve that much faith in them.
Anyway – hacked together the three separate .HRM files using a combination of stealth, guile and MS Excel, then used Sportstracks3 to convert to Garmin .TCX file like everyone else in the bloody world uses!
Ride details here
Grrr…. “Lost Communication with Brake Unit”
The bane of my riding sessions on the Tacx. Since the new version 3.8 of the TTS software, rather than just dying on it’s arse the software pops up a messsage that it’s lost its connection with the Brake Unit. The thing is, the message box pops up on screen, but the connection resumes, and the ride and logging continues. Problem is, the message box is in the middle o the screen, obscures the prime real-estate of the video, and theres no way to dismiss it other than stopping your training session and having to start again. At least it does give an option to save the ride status up to the crash.
Anyway – I managed, after a fair degree of buggeration, to ride the first 40km of the Etape du Tour 2010 video – From start of Video, over the Col De Marie-Blanque and finishing just over 40km later, in the flat section before the Col du Soulor. I’ve concatenated the individual Polar .HRM files to a single file, then ran it through SportsTracks 3‘s TCX Export routine, to get a Garmin Connect compatible file. I’m not pretending for one moment that the data didn’t need a little tidying up – after all there was a 12 minute hole in the middle of the 2 separate files, so HR data for example definitely needed a tweak – I basically straight lined the HR data from the end of the first file, until it met the second. I’m now going to trawl the Tacx website for possible solutions so that tomorrows ride won’t have to frig around like this…
Anyway – Ride details are here in Garmin Connect.
The Shrinking Cyclist 