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5 Easy Steps To The Site
1
In Depth Product Reviews
You probably stumbled upon here looking for a review of a sports gadget. If you’re trying to decide which unit to buy – check out my in-depth reviews section. Some reviews are over 60 pages long when printed out, with hundreds of photos! I aim to leave no stone unturned.
2
Read My Sports Gadget Recommendations.
Here’s my most recent GPS watch guide here, and cycling GPS computers here. Plus there are smart trainers here, all in these guides cover almost every category of sports gadgets out there. Looking for the equipment I use day-to-day? I also just put together my complete ‘Gear I Use’ equipment list, from swim to bike to run and everything in between (plus a few extra things). And to compliment that, here’s The Girl’s (my wife’s) list. Enjoy, and thanks for stopping by!
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Have some fun in the travel section.
I travel a fair bit, both for work and for fun. Here’s a bunch of random trip reports and daily trip-logs that I’ve put together and posted. I’ve sorted it all by world geography, in an attempt to make it easy to figure out where I’ve been.
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My Photography Gear: The Cameras/Drones/Action Cams I Use Daily
The most common question I receive outside of the “what’s the best GPS watch for me” variant, are photography-esq based. So in efforts to combat the amount of emails I need to sort through on a daily basis, I’ve complied this “My Photography Gear” post for your curious minds (including drones & action cams!)! It’s a nice break from the day-to-day sports-tech talk, and I hope you get something out of it!
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The Swim/Bike/Run Gear I Use List
Many readers stumble into my website in search of information on the latest and greatest sports tech products. But at the end of the day, you might just be wondering “What does Ray use when not testing new products?”. So here is the most up to date list of products I like and fit the bill for me and my training needs best! DC Rainmaker 2023 swim, bike, run, and general gear list. But wait, are you a female and feel like these things might not apply to you? If that’s the case (but certainly not saying my choices aren’t good for women), and you just want to see a different gear junkies “picks”, check out The Girl’s Gear Guide too.
Would be great, if you would create a new article comparing the different platforms:
– Garmin Connect
– Polar Flow
– Strava
– Training Peaks
I guess Garmin Connect supports a lot of features of the platforms you need to pay extra for.
I 2nd DerLord’s motion. In your spare time, when you have nothing else to do, if it’s even possible to compare/contrast the web platforms- it would be a useful metric of choice for many. including Movescount in the list- which now that I’ve gotten used to, I like better than Garmin Connect. Never used Polar flow.
Yeah would love a platform comparison as well. Personally, I’m under the impression Training Peaks is really for the more professional runner, not for fun runners like myself, but I haven’t tried out TP yet. I’m a stats geek, so who knows? But I don’t have a trainer and I run just for fun; right now Strava (premium) is my platform, even though the Garmin pages have improved a lot.
“The Vibrator” – Do we even wanna know why?
Guessing it’s pave (cobblestones).
So I suppose that means keeping up premium Strava on top of a TP account to get these segments?
In effect, as Live Segments on a device requires a premium subscription.
My question as well, so it’s premium Strava and TrainingPeaks and I’d guess soon enough SportsTracks honestly it’s all a joke especially at a 30% premium to pay them all in AUD
They want all your moneys.
Ray
I assume you could default to Garmin Segments (vs Strava) which is free and similar in concept to Strava segments and get the same analysis and automatic load in training peaks?
Thanks.
I hadn’t thought of it, but probably could.
Haha hard earned at that
It does? I don’t have a premium starva account and live segments work on my 520 edge. Or am I totally misunderstanding your comment?
That, or use link to gniza.org
Looks like you can only analyse segments if you have a subscription. I can see a couple of marked segments on my last ride, but I can’t go into the analysis as I only have a free account.
Fantastic. I’ve really enjoyed some of the new features that TrainingPeaks have added over the past few months, especially the “Home” page summary thing that they added a little while back.
I have a few quick questions:
(1) Given that you have to be a Strava Premium member in order to setup live segments on your device, I presume that means non-premium users won’t be having these Strava Segment entries written into the Fit files?
(2) Do you think Strava and/or Garmin/Wahoo will see this as encroaching on their territory and move to block this by removing/altering the Strava Segment entries that are written into the fit files? You’d have thought that they would have all spent considerable time and resources setting up these collaborations and now TP swoop in and bag some new features by piggy-backing off all their hard work!
(3) Will TP and Garmin ever support auto-syncing of weight data from the Garmin Index -> Garmin Connect -> TrainingPeaks?! Come on guys, it’s been a year now, DO IT ALREADY!
In my opinion, Strava would welcome others using their hard work, since it requires a subscription to Strava to use these features. If there are more devices / websites that can have Live Segments, there are more undoubtedly going to be more subscriptions, just to use the feature on their device / website.
Apart from the delivery system and payment methodology of the two products what is the difference between Training Peaks and WKO4? I thought they were the same product but differed only with respect to delivery and payment.
I had contemplated buying WKO4 but not sure now if it is dissimilar to Training Peaks and considered a poor sister in not getting updates/feature parity, which is the better choice for features?
Guess I will wait for your full review coming up.
Quite a bit different actually. Their semi-older blog post covers the technical differences, though both products have had feature updates since then (also one reason I generally don’t like doing software platform comparisons – they quickly fall out of date): link to home.trainingpeaks.com
Thanks, that link is very helpful indeed.
Trying not to think about where on your bike you attach “the Vibrator”.
Crap…I can no longer hide my Strava obsession from my coach!
None of my TP activities have live segment laps showing. Any idea if the live segment laps only appear in TP if the actual FIT file itself is loaded into TP, presumably via Garmin Connect auto-sync or manually uploading the FIT file? I tend to bulk-upload several activities at a time to my own and to my wife’s TP accounts using Device Agent, which converts FIT files to PWX files along the way, so maybe that conversion strips out the live segment data.
Yeah you will have to load the raw fit for now. The parser in device agent does not currently support the segment parsing.
> Runs don’t show up, because Garmin (nor Wahoo or Mio) haven’t released any running-capable Live Segments devices yet.
Right on cue the 4.20 release today for the Forerunner 735 has enabled this! The challenge though is that the supporting software to get segments onto the device does not appear to have been released yet. But you can “side load” at least cycling ones either from your Edge or using gniza.org/segments – copy the FIT files into NEWFILES on your 735.
Am I the only on noticing that Training Peaks doesn’t mention the word “Strava” anywhere on their article? They just say “segments”. Those could be even “Training Peaks segments”
Likely just flying under the radar a bit for whatever reason.
But they are Strava Segments.
I know they are, but that they don’t name it as such reaffirms the botty call theory.
This is nice and cool, but TP still misses the point of the segment, which is to compare it with your past performances.
It would be great if we could use the analysis tools of TP to look at a specific segment and compare our performance in different conditions.
Right now I need to go fetch manually all the times I have ridden the segment and compare manually.
If anything TP should have their own version of segments, private and all, not for comparing with your buddies, but to compare your own performance.
I am new to TP and would appreciate segment integration. Unfortunately this does not work anymore. TP help desk confirmed that this feature was ultimately removed after short period of time.