- [Taren] Morning, Trainiacs.
I want to take a bit of a break
from your regularly scheduled Endurance Training Program
to talk about the Garmin Rally Pedals.
Now, full disclosure,
as you can see back there,
Garmin is a sponsor of the channel.
But when I was working out, the sponsorship with Garmin,
I specifically left out of that sponsorship power pedals.
And the reason for that is because
when the sponsorship between Garmin and I came up,
their Vector Power Pedals,
their Version 1, their Version 2,
their Version 3 were,
even as some Garmin people told me
like fairly publicly without secret,
they're like, yeah, the vector pedals aren't really
something that we are tremendously happy with right now
and they're being redone.
So they ended up actually coming out
with the Garmin Rally Pedals.
These are the rally pedals for road bike.
These are the rally pedals for a gravel bike
or a mountain bike.
And even in some of their own product announcement
collateral they said that a lot of the issues
that were common to the Garmin Vector Power Pedals
have been fixed with these Garmin Rally Pedals.
That's part of the reason why they're not the Vector 4,
they're the rally.
They want to get away from that vector name.
So now well Garmin is technically
a sponsor of this channel and our team.
They aren't really a sponsor of these power pedals.
I can choose to use these or not.
They have no say over whether or not
I actually use these pedals,
but they wanted to send them out
because they really do believe that they alleviated
some of those issues with the vector pedals.
Now I've been using these Garmin Rally XC Pedals
on my gravel bike for probably around six months,
basically the entire year I've used these road pedals
for the last two months as I've gone out
and started doing some tri bike riding.
And I can tell you that night and day,
the things that I heard
that were bad about the vector pedals,
I have an experienced any of that.
So let's get into this.
Two of the most common complaints that I heard
with the Garmin Vector Pedals
were first, that the power was wildly off
and I can attest to this.
There was actually a friend who,
when we would put the power down
and do like a 10 or 20 minute max effort interval,
he would always ride away from me.
And we're about the same weight
we were at the time when we were riding together,
we're right coming in at that 160 pounds,
and he would always ride away from me.
And we were still both in the aero position.
So theoretically he should have been putting out more power.
Now at the time, I would have been putting out power
that was like 270 watts,
his vector pedals, the original version,
were reading 170 watts,
like wildly off.
The other scenario that again I can attest to is that
the Garmin Vector Pedals were so specific
with how much you need to tighten it,
that I had a friend that when we are traveling to
Half Ironman Campeche in Mexico,
she had to travel with her own torque wrench that
if the torque that the pedals were tightened to were off
by as much as like one Newton meter,
it would read as much as 40 watts off,
like it was wildly off.
And that was the big thing that I wanted to test
when I first started riding these.
So I first started riding on the Garmin Rally XC Pedals,
the cross-country, the off-road gravel bike, mountain bike,
what have you pedals.
And what I ended up doing was,
I've got a pretty good sense
of what an appropriate power is,
depending on how it feels.
I would actually end up riding blind
and doing some efforts without looking at the power,
thinking that I was holding somewhere around 210 watts,
targeting roughly that.
And in the end,
I would look down and see where my power was,
and it was basically exactly right in line
with what I would have expected.
Give or take certainly a few percentage points
in whether I'm off or the power's off,
I would actually argue that I was off
in what I was guessing,
but it's not off by a hundred watts or 40 watts.
Also what I've done to see how finicky these pedals were
or how robust they were and versatile they were,
if they needed to be treated with kid gloves
and very carefully finely tune,
I ended up installing a lot of these actually
just with hand tension,
because that's about as far off as you can possibly get from
the tension that you should have
and seeing if it affected the power reading.
And sure enough with just hand tension
and a calibration at the start of the ride,
it was again, pretty much bang on.
I also did a few rides in cold weather, in hot weather,
that was something that in my old power pedals,
the PowerTap P1s and the PowerTap P2s,
that would be off by about 40 or 50 watts,
if I went and calibrated it one day where it was really hot,
and then I rode the next morning where it was really cold,
that wasn't the case.
It was maybe off by
10 would have been my guess,
but it was so small that it was unnoticeable
with the Garmin Rally Pedals.
Now, while we're on the topic of bringing out
the PowerTap Pedals, these are the PowerTap P1s,
I also added the PowerTap P2s.
But comparing the two,
you can see the PowerTap P1s
are a much, much bulkier pedal
than the Garmin SPD Style Rally Pedal,
that if you didn't know that it had power in it,
you wouldn't actually know that it's a power pedal.
So one issue that I used to have
with these large PowerTap P1s is if I was taking a corner,
when I was road cycling really, really fast,
I could actually clip the corner.
And when you clip the bottom of these pedals,
as this has happened once, there you go,
you can actually bring the spindle that's on the inside,
out of place.
In addition to that,
these weigh almost 200 grams per pedal,
these are about 165 grams per pedal.
So it's just a much slighter build.
Like it's a much more practical build.
And I would say that the PowerTap P1s,
I really love for their robustness to be able to go
from one bike to another really, really quickly,
but the vector pedal,
I just couldn't believe in.
The rally pedal,
I hundred percent believe in,
I've swapped this out from one bike to the next,
rode it from one day to the next,
do a quick recalibration and boom done.
But it's not all total sunshine and rainbows.
There are three small, but certainly worth mentioning
situations that I think you need to be aware of
if you're thinking about getting these pedals.
The first one is that,
you cannot take these out with an allen key
just into the spindle, it's actually blocked off.
And the reason that I imagine this is,
is because some of the guts
for the power pedal are actually inside of there.
So you have to have a pedal wrench
or a small enough wrench,
just a standard wrench to actually get in
and take out these pedals.
And fortunately, I had a wrench to take this off,
but I have always preferred to use an allen key
through the spindle.
The next thing is that specifically with the XC pedals,
the off-road pedals, adjusting the tension for the cleat
of clipping in was real learning experience.
Now it's got the indication here of you turn it this way,
you go righty tidy,
and it gets a little bit tighter
and you're going to have a harder time unclipping
and lefty loosey or you are going to have more play,
and it's going to be easier for you to slip out.
Well, how every single
one of these
threads and screws
ended up coming out of the box
was it was so tight that I ended up
basically just turning the allen key
about a quarter turn one way or another
thinking that that was the maximum amount of play that I had
because it got so tight that I didn't want to break
or strip the threads on this.
What I ended up doing at one point was I got so frustrated
with the lack of adjustability in that,
like I had so much play that my foot
was just constantly unclipping,
that I turned it, turned it, turned it, it cracked.
And I thought that I actually broke the nut in here,
but what happened was it just basically broke
all of the connections or the tightness,
or maybe they use lock tight actually set this screw.
But that actually then gave me the ability
to have that play.
So if you are in the situation where you're like,
just can't adjust the clips in this,
feel a little bit dangerous
and know that you've got to basically break that seal
to actually get the adjustability to happen.
And the third thing that I'll point out
on the Rally XC Pedals is,
I'm starting to get a little bit of rust here.
I've had this for less than a year,
and I will admit that these pedals
were sitting in behind the vehicle
as we drove to Calgary and back.
So we're talking,
I think roughly about 2,000 kilometers,
but it's not like I drove through a monsoon or a rainstorm,
and we're starting to get a little bit of rust on that.
I mean, that can be brushed off.
It hasn't affected any of the components,
any of the performance of this.
It's just a little bit like, one guy in our group actually
noticed it and pointed it out last weekend
and he's like, dude, really already?
Yeah.
So if you're wondering about buying these,
I would say yes, but a couple of the housekeeping tasks
of what your options are going to be,
you're going to have a single sided or a double-sided,
you're also going to have cycling dynamics
or no cycling dynamic.
You also have the ability to retrofit a current
Garmin SPD Pedal into a power pedal.
So the range in prices is going to be as little as around
$700 all the way up to 1,200 to $1,300.
It's right in line with what all good power pedals
are costing these days.
So if you're just wondering,
hey, should I even consider these?
I would say yes.
If you're thinking about buying the Garmin Rally Pedals
and you found this helpful in your buying decision,
we put a lot of work into this.
Like I say, about six months of testing before I could feel
like I had an actual confident opinion on this.
So lots of work and as a thank you, I'd love it
if you hit the like button below.
If you want to dive more into the nitty gritty details of
exact testing, exact parameters for this,
DC Rainmaker does the best job at that.
And I'll link to his review of these pedals over there.
With that, later trainiacs.