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Blog Featured March 25, 2020

A mildly dilated right atrium

It’s shallow, I know, but I always look forward to the yearly electrocardiogram (ECG). There’s always that moment when the nurse looks confused, pauses, and then asks if it’s normal for my resting heart rate (RHR) to be below 50BPM. FLEX! Everything was going to plan this year, except that for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, the ECG indicated left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH). My doctor was largely unconcerned, mentioning something about how…

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Blog Featured March 24, 2020

All in on Garmin

Fitbit promised a unified view of me and my activities, but never delivered the detail or verifiability I was looking for. So I’m going to give Garmin a try. Why? Because I’m satisfied with my Edge 530, and I know they have the depth of devices, experience, and data that I want; at least on paper. While I’m not in love with the usability of their products, there’s no denying that they…

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Blog March 20, 2020

Garmin EDGE 530 Update

Whenever you get the first batch of anything; car, phone, watch, or bike computer, there’s always a bit of risk that it might not be quite “done”. Which was certainly the case for me with my Garmin EDGE 530, where the buttons were really hard to use. It finally got to the point where it was taking 5-6 HARD presses to get the back button to do anything, so I figured it…

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Blog Featured March 19, 2020

Fed up with Fitbit

After waiting almost 18 months for Fitbit to turn the SPO2 sensor in my Charge 3, seeing how useless the implementation is, and watching them kill off one of the feature requests I marginally cared about with a tone-deaf response which indicated that they didn’t understand the ask, I’m done. Three Fitbit trackers and five years on the platform, the magic is gone… It’s been building for a while, with many reasons,…

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Blog Featured March 18, 2020

One Cleat To Rule Them All

When I bought my first road bike, I briefly considered getting road shoes and pedals, but quite frankly I didn’t see the point. It’s nice to be able to walk in my shoes, not have to carry cleat covers, and now that I have a gravel bike it makes even more sense to have a single, unified, approach to shoes and pedals. Whatever bike I take, it’s the same cleat system, everything…

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Blog March 17, 2020

Sampling the bottom

Let me start out by saying that I find the technical content put out by Hambini to be incredibly useful. I’ve also seriously considered getting one of his Shimano bottom brackets (BB) for my Tarmac (but then I got a Specialized Power Crank instead). That said, I do find his presentation style to be a bit abrasive and unnecessarily confrontational. But, clearly it’s working for him; just look at the subscriber count……

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Blog March 16, 2020

A Brand Ambassadorship Masterclass: Dynaplug Edition

You can learn a lot about a company by watching how they react to criticism. Do they acknowledge the concern, attempt to dispel the issues raised with facts and data, or do they pull out the “bruh” speak, emoji, and unrelated YouTube videos? Turns out if you’re running Dynaplug’s Twitter account, it’s the second option… Now, it’s quite possible that I’m being paranoid, and over-weighing the risks of fixing a sharp metal…

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Blog March 12, 2020

Where have all the 53 chainrings gone?

I run PRAXIS Works rings on my Specialized Power Crank, and while I’m currently rocking the 50/34 I’ve been considering swapping in a 52/36 for a long time now. That said, I live in Illinois, so I could even get away with a 53-tooth 1x setup with an 11-23 in the back… So when I was at CABDA I took the chance to ask one of their product managers about why they…

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