AeroPod, PowerPod and Newton

The last two days here in Abilene have seen sustained winds out of the SSW at 20mph with gusts to 35mph.

My ride loops inevitably involve at least a couple of miles worth of totally exposed cross-wind sections (so exposed that if you look at the files at 1 mile segments you can see where houses provide momentary windblocks . . .)

Up until fw 3.09 the ibike did not do well in these cross-wind sections. For example, during a race in February with the wind howling at 30+mph out of the north, I watched my heart-rate spike to 183 while the watts read something like 47 in a nasty cross-wind section.

The performance is much better now.

(Although--and this is a request for Boyd to take a look at this file to see if the wind scale is close. The wind hasn't been calm enough to get a good cal. ride in.)

Wow, that is a windy day. I imagine you must have felt like everything was trying to prevent you from going fast up that hill.

This is tough to really look at and get the wind scaling nailed down to an exact number because of all the crosswinds. If you have a chance in the morning when the wind is not howling yet, go for a quick spin. Find a loop around a mile or so and ride four or five loops of this circuit. Then send me that file or post it on here and I can really nail down the wind scaling.

I will tell you that it looks to be really good from my observations though. The first 18 miles when you were going directly into that headwind you registered a 9.0 average wind speed. The time after that was an average of -1.1, and that included a lot of crosswind that would register as headwind so you're not going to have the exact inverse coming back. I really think this looks good, but if you want I'll be glad to verify for you if you can ride those loops in calm wind.

Thanks for looking at it, Boyd.

I was going to do coast-downs and a cal ride for the tt bike today, but today's wind is 25mph out of the se with gusts to 30+, so that's on hold.

Actually, the wind-scaling looked pretty good to me too, and I'm pleased to see how the improvements in the cross-wind performance. And, the offset was dead-on at the end of the ride. (I started from and stopped at my garage door, which is wind-sheltered.)

On days like yesterday, where I'm mostly trying to keep an endurance tempo, that absolute wind display is really useful because it lets me gauge effort. In fact, during the most obnoxious of those headwind sections I kept it on so I could modulate effort. It gets difficult to tell the magnitude between headwind forces--and (stepping on soap-box) I think headwinds provide one of the major reasons for riding with power because headwinds are invisible and harder to gauge than hill slope (and out here they certainly last longer!).