Sometimes, ego gets in the way.
My heart rate strap, the large puddle of sweat underneath me, and my own intuition after thousands of hours on the bike were telling me one story.
My power meter was telling a very different one.
I knew something wasn’t quite right, but I didn’t know how to fix it. As much as I tried to ignore it, the numbers on the display are there to be used, and when they are not right, it can be disheartening and distracting.
The whole experience reminded me a little bit of my days as a college flight instructor.
I can remember the flight instructor meeting vividly. Sitting in the conference room, a bunch of type A personalities in our matching flight instuctor polo shirts.
Having just sat through a training presentation on the new avionics suite that would be installed in our new Piper Warriors, one of my friends asked what our students would be expected to know and be tested on.
“So, air data goes in, and pretty colors come out?”
This was almost all of our first experience with a “glass cockpit”. All of us had learned and instructed on mechanical flight instruments.
A knowledge of how those mechanical instruments were built and how they functioned was critical to understanding the data they were giving you.
It was also important to understand the limitations of the mechanical systems. To learn any potential fail points or errors. How or why might the instrument give you bad data? What could you do about it?
So when those instruments are transtioned from mechanical devices to data computers, the fundamental knowledge of how those instruments were doing their respectively similar job went down.
Back to my sweaty bike trainer on the back deck, I knew something wasn’t right. I suspected my power meter, but my understanding of the decice was similar to that of the new air data computer. I push on the pedals, and pretty colors and numbers show up on the screen.
Why was I getting bad data? Was it bad data? How does the tool even work? Is it something I can fix? Am I just being a wimp? (The power data being shown was tragically low compared to what i was expecting/used to seeing)
These were all the questions going throughy my head. I decided to phone a friend and found that my pedals just needed a simple recalibration.
By recalibrating the pedals to a new zero set point, they immediately started showing the correct (and much more reassuring for my delicate ego) power numbers.
But I still didn’t really understand what I was measuring, or more accurately, how I was measuring it.
God bless the internet. What a time to be alive.
A power meter, measures torque using an electricity sensitive strain gauge. Basically, an electrical mesh is placed inside of whatever surface or tool is being strained. A small computer measures the electrical resiatance in the mesh. When torque (twisting force) is put on the surface or tool, the electrical mesh feels some of that force and the electrical resistance changes. The computer measures those changes and then transmits them to another device for display.
I had a basic understanding of pedal harder more power. Push on the power meter and pretty colorful numbers show up on my bike computer. Only the numbers were less pretty and more disheartening.
Even the idea of recalibrating, while it made sense, left me with an unfinished feeling. That went away once I researched how the power meter worked.
I think that’s an important part of the recalibration process that gets overlooked. Something is broken, or something isn’t working right. We recalibrate, and the issue is resolved, but we don’t know enough about why it was giving us bad data in the first place.
Without that knowledge, without that insight into the why and the how, we are left with input->computer->pretty color display. When things break down, that becomes painfully insufficient.
I try to remind myself of this silly lesson whenever I need to recalibrate. We all need a reset sometimes. Underatanding the why and the how, and getting back to baseline can help on the path to serenity.
Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.
