Despite still being a bit tired I headed out on the bike this morning. Ride went nicely enough, although it took me about 40kms to feel that way. Felt really quite average for the first bit. Not all of the ride went nicely, with my power meter not being all that keen to come to the party. Not to worry though, I know the reason for that.
While in Phuket I found this:
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| Pedal Pod |
THIS by the way, is a Garmin Vector pedal pod. It is part of the Garmin Vector power meter. Basically this is the bit that transmits the power measurements taken by the pedal up to the bike computer. Specifically this is my left one and if I am being technically correct, this one transmits to the pedal pod on the right had side which then transmits to the bike computer. Not really that relevant, transmits is the moral of this particular tale.
Anyway, as far as I can guess, that broken metal is due to fatigue from the pod being taken off and put on so many times because I swap between bikes at least once a week. I should point out that I don't over torque these things (over tighten them), I am very careful about that. Just plain worn out instead.
Anyway, what I found in Phuket was that this missing metal could cause the pod to get a bit loose when riding if you weren't exceptionally careful when putting the pedal on. If I am not mistaken, having the pod, and therefore the pedal, suddenly a bit loose would throw out the accuracy of the power meter. Being the engineer that I am it did occur to me to bodge up a solution, but in the end I find the power meters are so finicky that I decided to just replace the pod instead (they aren't all that much - about $100). So on Friday that is what I did and this morning I went for a ride.
I have actually replaced one of these before and that time I remember it being an exceptionally simple process. I just simply took off the old one, put on the new one and away I went. This time though, when I rode out this morning the power meter was all over the place. For one the readings were completely wrong, also cadence was incorrect, or just not coming up at all. It had me totally baffled. I tried recalibrating the power meter a few times but nothing seemed to help so in the end I just turned it off and had a ride relying on good old plain velocity instead.
When I got home I started digging into the issue. My fear was that I had simply got a dud and I would have to head back to Churchill Cycles to get another. Before I took that route though I wanted to make sure I had tried everything. So I tried everything. Pedals off, pedals on, change batteries etc, etc. I was coming to the end of my solutions when I finally thought to check online for a solution. And there, in the glowing comfort of cyberspace I found a solution on the Garmin forums. It seems like somebody else had had a similar problem and a person from Garmin had suggested that the pedals may have been running different firmware (that is apparently a thing that can happen now) and that would cause the pedals to not play nicely with each other. Based on that I updated the firmwear for both pedals (turns out it was out of date) and so far they seem to be working fine. I haven't done a proper ride yet, but I have had the bike on the trainer and it looks about right. I will give the bike a proper ride over the next few days, but so far so good.
On a side note, it looks like the new pod I have is made slightly tougher than my old one. Apparently breaking pods is a fairly common problem and I have read that in response Garmin have beefed up the latest generation. Hopefully fatigue failures like this mine don't happen that often anymore.
Ironman WA tomorrow. I plan to spend the day enjoying the fact that it isn't me.
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