Archive for category: News

Today we bring you info on installation efficiencies as well as a tip of our hat to your exceptional efforts!

First off, to speed things up, PRECISION installation ship kits have now gone digital.  Once it’s your turn in the queue, we will send you the placement measurement and shipping instructions via email vs. post.  Eliminating this extra shipping leg from the process will shorten the time it takes to get your crank into the 4iiii factory and keep a more consistent manufacturing queue.  The new method will still give you all of the information you need to ensure the appropriate clearance for your PRECISION pod. Those of you with bike/crank combinations that are a bit trickier fitment-wise, such as those with a Trek Madone or any bike with a bottom bracket-mounted brake calliper, can still request a physical ship kit with a dummy pod. Placement of your power meter is key so we want you to have both options.   One more thing on installation processes, as per your requests, we’re transitioning to a new crank identification system -manufacturing-approved stickers labelled with all of your unique information.

We are also seriously impressed and inspired by all of our PRECISION customers who are committed to some major events this season.  Here are a few that you’ve told us about thus far: Ironman – Coeur D’Alene; Ironman -Deauville; Triathlon – Minneapolis; Lincoln Grand Prix – UK; Tour de Berlin – Germany; The Arctic Race – Norway; Ironman World Championships – Kona, Hawaii.

We respect that these races definitely push your personal limits, requiring extremely focused training, early mornings, hard intervals (that no one wants to ride with you!), three hour marathon trainer sessions before you work and/or sleep, adjusting training for your various seasons, etc., etc., etc.  To everything that you’ve already put into getting where you are, and to everywhere your ride is going to take you, we salute you!

Here’s a good ‘ol western tip of the hat from Greg, our Director of SW Engineering.  It’s one of our favourite times of year, Stampede in Calgary. Ten days of all things wild and western. Yahoooo!

 

 

On this super warm Alberta day (28’ C, 80’F), we bring you some power insight and our thanks.

We can’t say enough about our terrific customers. Not only do you show us great support and patience, but you also take the time to send us your comments.

“I’m very happy with my PRECISION and will recommend it to all my friends.”

“I appreciate very much what you guys are trying to do with PRECISION and your vision for it in the market sector. I’m sure you guys are doing the best you can and I wish you great market success.”

“We understand the pain during growth. Keep on coming to market with great, innovative products.”

Thank you! These notes keep our team excited to work for you.

We will continue to use the tracker to outline our progress and reach out to customers individually when we have information re specific order timing.

And now some insight on racing with power. This past weekend, two of our crew – Emma and Karel – raced the Kicking Horse Cup in Golden B.C. The race is a true climber’s delight with a flat prologue, followed by a 13km mass start hill climb, and wrapping up with a very hilly (okay, mountainous) road race and here’s Karel’s recap:

Racing a time trial with a power meter like PRECISION is perhaps the easiest race to analyze, so we’ll focus on that. The planning for such a race starts with estimating the time required to cover the course. In this case, the prologue was 6 km long, and flat, so I estimated that I should be able finish in approximately 8 minutes (approximately 45km/hr).

Those of you already training with power will recognize the following graph as a maximal power curve. The graph shows power on the vertical axis and time on the horizontal axis. Programs like TrainingPeaks and Golden Cheetah generate and maintain these graphs throughout your training by updating the graph every time you hit a new maximum average power for a time interval on the horizontal axis. According to my power curve, the best power output I’ve managed during this season over an 8 minute interval (our time estimate) is about 345 watts.

To me this indicates that if I’m well rested, if I get a good warm up in, and if I have a good day (yes a lot of ifs), then I should be able to average 345 watts during the race, and that should be my target. In order to hit that target, I use a very simple screen setup for my bike computer. All it shows is distance, 3-second average power and average power.

The pink line on my maximal power curve shows the power profile from the race. As you can see, there’s a sharp point at approximately 7:45 (the actual length of time it took to complete the race). The point comes very close to touching my maximal power curve indicating that I came just short of hitting a new best average power for that time interval, so it was a good effort.

What differentiates a good effort from a great effort is pacing. Ideally, you’d want to have very steady power output for the duration of the race. This is hard to accomplish, especially in a short time trial due to adrenaline, and the fear of going out too easily, and not being able to get that time back later in the race. The graph below shows my power output during the race and you can see that I’ve made the very common error of going out too hard at the beginning and then fading towards the end. Had I had the self-control to start a little easier, I probably could have maintained that effort till the end, and been a few seconds faster.

In the end, the effort was good enough for 4^th place. Our illustrious product manager, on the other hand, managed to win that race (and the others) in her category.

Things remain status quo in the 4iiii factory. This means that our efforts to get your orders back on schedule continue and we are making progress. As you’ll see in our tracker, our fulfillment has increased and ship kits have started to flow out to customers once again.

As you know, 4iiii is a company of athletes designing and developing products for fellow athletes. Apart from each person’s day job, the crew is engaged in varied personal activities and objectives that are also reliant on great monitoring data. Here’s a story from one of our staffers who recently learned that pushing crazy power doesn’t necessarily make you go fast! Meet Karel, a PhD in Computer Science and competitive Cat 3 road racer:

During a team time trial on the local race scene here, I found myself floundering more than usual, sucking wheel the whole way, not being able to contribute to the effort and, in fact, hindering it. Definitely one of the most disappointing and infuriating races of my competitive career! After the finish line, I got off of my bike in disgust only to find that my front brake had been stuck on for the duration of the race. When I examined the power data afterwards, I found that I’d been pushing 80 watts more than my team mate, who’d been soft pedaling in order to let me keep up. After I calmed down, I re-evaluated all the physical forces, beyond a stuck brake, that can slow me down: the interplay of power, aerodynamic drag, gravity and friction. Here’s what I know:

Power is the force that helps us go faster and is, to some degree, under our control. The more power a cyclist is able to produce, the faster they will go, all else being equal. As a result, most of us cyclists obsess over our power numbers and rely heavily on our power meters. Ultimately, we want to train well to produce more power and also combat the forces that slow us down.

When riding on flat ground, aerodynamic drag is the strongest force opposing a bike rider. Exceptions to this would be during a steep hill climb, or in the case where there’s a stiff tailwind (yes, dream scenario). Cyclists spend huge sums of money to make their bikes more aerodynamic (especially in triathlon and time trialing). However, the largest source of aerodynamic drag in a bike-rider system is the rider so, arguably, a good bike fit might be the best way to help you achieve an aero, yet powerful riding position. Other smaller, inexpensive items such as a well-fitting skin suit and a pair of shoe covers can have larger-than-anticipated benefits when combating drag.

If the road angles up steeply, gravity quickly becomes the strongest hindrance to our forward progress. In these situations, aero wizardry is of little help and the only thing we can do to make ourselves go faster is to make the bike-rider system lighter. As with aerodynamics, some cyclists (so-called weight weenies) spend vast sums to make their bikes as light as possible, but it should be pointed out that the bicycle accounts for a small percentage of the weight of the bike-rider system. For most cyclists, the best way to go up a hill faster is to examine our own eating habits.

Friction is another factor that slows us down. There’s been a lot of discussion lately that wider tires cause less rolling resistance over imperfect surfaces. On rougher roads, it turns out that breaking out those beefy 25mm tires and letting a bit of air out of them makes you go faster, and makes the ride more comfortable. On roads of perfect pavement, a skinny tire with high pressure remains the fastest option.

Drivetrain friction also slows you down so keep your bike clean and well maintained. A surprising amount drivetrain friction is also caused by cross chaining, or running gear combinations that don’t have straight chain lines. A lot of us like to stay in the big ring as long as possible, but using that front derailleur a little more often can actually make you faster.

The worst drivetrain friction of all? You guessed it, a stuck front brake. I don’t recommend trying it in a race!

A few points for you today re our factory installation, shipping charges and a “calibration reload” scenario being experienced by some customers. We are working hard to catch up from the manufacturing delay we experienced last week and hope to be caught up soon.

The factory installation program is focused on getting PRECISION on your own crank AND minimizing the amount of time that you are without your equipment.

When we process your order, we assign you a rough installation window.

• Shortly before that window date, we’ll send you a pre-installation kit and shipping package/information. The pre-installation kit allows you to determine the optimal placement of the unit as we need to make doubly sure that there is enough clearance between the power meter and your bike’s frame.
• Once you’ve marked the position for the installation, you send us your crank arm using the pre-paid shipping pack.
• When we get your crank arm, it enters our Factory where we install PRECISION and then ship it back to you.

As you know, as part of our Factory Install, we currently cover the shipping costs to get your cranks to our factory. We also still subsidize the shipping of your crank back to you, which is why your shipping charges are minimal. Separate to shipping, however, is the fact that there are times when your country of origin also charges taxes and duties. This does not apply to North America thanks to NAFTA but each other country has separate rules and we continue to investigate ways to reduce all fees for you. FedEx also charges a convenience fee for expediting international deliveries, which, unfortunately, cannot be avoided.

A few customers have reported that they are getting cadence numbers, but either no or extremely high power numbers. This may happen when PRECISION loses its factory calibration values (not to be confused with the values shown when you zero your PRECISION using your head unit or mobile app). This problem can be fixed by reloading the factory calibration values through our 4iiii app, which is available for both iOS and Android

Connect to your PRECISION using the app, once you’ve installed it. Then use the appropriate menu option (Factory Restore on iOS, and Restore Factory Calibration on Android) to reload the values. With that step completed, zero your PRECISION and go for a ride!

See you next week!

 

Some app info and training wisdom for you this week!

The 4iiii app supports the 4iiii Viiiiva heart rate strap, PRECISION power meter, and Sportiiii heads up display. Both the 4iiii app on iOS, and the 4iiii Gear Configuration app on Android are where you go to:

• pair ANT+ sensors through your Viiiiva to your smartphone,
• configure your Sportiiii (4iiii iOS only).
• gather information about your device including the current firmware version and your serial number for Viiiiva and PRECISION, reloading PRECISION calibration values,
• zero (calibrate) PRECISION,
• get the latest PRECISION and Viiiiva, over-the-air firmware updates,
• customize your device name (for PRECISION, coming for Viiiiva)

The iOS app also functions as a head unit for all your Bluetooth Smart sensors. It’s able to connect to Bluetooth Smart-compliant foot pods, bike speed/cadence sensors, power meters, or heart rate monitors. The app will also allow you to display all data coming from your devices and record .fit files for your coach and fitness programs. You can also access your ANT+ device data in real time on your phone if you’re using the Viiiiva.

Tip of the day: To keep your battery fresh for your ride, take it out of the PRECISION pod while you’re traveling as continual bumping will wake up the unit. This will be improved in a future over-the-air upgrade.

And now, some wisdom from one of the world’s top power gurus, Hunter Allen. We are pleased that we will be featuring Hunter’s tips on a regular basis. Here’s the first:

“Traveling gives me a unique insight into how the people of this country are so very different – each bringing their own perspectives to cycling, power training and endurance sports.  We are similar though in that we have strengths and weaknesses, are limited in our training time, respond somewhat similarly to training stimuli and all want to improve.  These similarities are the key reasons why training with a power meter can help us to improve our cycling.  In my travels, I have met pro road cyclists, track athletes, ultra endurance mountain bikers, triathletes, recreational riders and many others,  each asking me questions about how they can best use their power meter to optimize their training time, optimize their chronic training load and also optimize their individual intervals as well.   The knowledge of using a power meter for optimization is one of the top asked questions that I get at my seminars and book signings.   Sure, everyone wants to hear about this pro or that pro and see how to analyze their power file in the TrainingPeaks WKO+ software, but the general theme is always around optimization.

After you have had a power meter for at least six to eight months, you will have plenty of data to review in order to find trends based on the training response to your training dose.   We each have limited time to train – you’ll make the best use of your time if you are focused during those key training hours.”   Read more at: http://www.hunterallenpowerblog.com/2011/03/power-of-knowledge-and-knowledge-of.html