- Okay, I think we all know by now
that I love my tech, but I know I'm not alone.
So today, I thought I'd share my favorite tech from 2019.
(electronic trilling)
All right, this has been a tough one to whittle down,
but I've picked out my favorite tech
and more notable tech of the year.
And if you do like anything you see during this video,
make sure you hit that thumbs up.
But given that we are triathletes, let start with the swim,
which is a discipline that I guess has been left behind
somewhat in terms of technological advances,
particularly when you compare it to cycling and running
and the amount of data we can capture from them.
Swimming can seem rather basic in comparison.
But, there are a few brands out there
that are changing this, and one of which is Phlex.
Early this year they released a tracker
that attaches to your current goggles and buzzes
to tell you which zone you're in
by reading your heart rate through the device.
And also, quite a nice thing is, it actually has LEDs
on the side to also indicate to your coach
which zone you're in.
But the bit that really blew my mind
is actually with its post-session analysis.
Now, we were fortunate enough to have Jazz Carlin,
the ex-international swimmer pop by GTN
and actually show us some of her data that she captured
from some of her swims previously.
And without telling the device
what she had planned on doing, it had worked out
which bit was her warm-up, which bit was her main set,
which bit was the warm-down,
it had broken it down into the reps.
But the bit that was absolutely mind-blowing,
was the fact that it had worked out which stroke
she had been swimming on, which is really impressive
for such a small device to figure out those things.
So, yeah, very cool bit of tech.
But the next bit of swimmy tech
that I've really enjoyed this year is from Form.
Okay, I've banged on about these a fair bit this year.
But just check them out.
It's all the data that you'll need
within the lens of your goggle.
And, if that doesn't make you feel futuristic,
I don't know what will.
But I'll just recap if you haven't heard me talk
about them already.
It's an augmented reality display
within the lens of your goggle, so it will be displaying
your pace, your distance, your laps, your stroke rate,
even your heart rate, so all the data that you'll need.
And, if you like, you can actually program sessions
into it, so you can follow them
within the lens of your goggle.
It'll tell you how many reps you've got left,
how much recovery you've got,
the time for those reps, and so on.
Again, really fancy stuff.
But one bit of tech that has managed
to slip by me this year,
but I'm going to feature it now anyway.
It's called Nome, and its from Trinsik Sports,
and it's essentially a really fancy pace clock
made out of LEDs that goes
along the bottom of the swimming pool.
Now I've not actually seen this device in person.
From what I can work out, you actually place this device
on the wall at the end of the pool
and its a little bit like a reel of hose
except the reel on this device is a strip of LEDs.
So then you pull out that strip of LEDs
and you submerge that on the bottom of the pool
from one end of the lane to the other.
And then, on the device itself, you can set the pace
to whatever pace you're hoping to swim at
or desired pace, and those LEDs will illuminate
at that set pace, which is a little bit like
when you're watching the swimming on TV
and you see that world record pace line
in front of the swimmers, except for this,
it's actually for real.
The swimmer can actually see
those lights illuminate and that pace.
Now, I've had a little search around on the Nome website
as I'm trying to find out a little bit more about them,
and it actually sounds like this portable device
is just the start for them.
What they're really hoping, is that swimming pools are going
to actually reconsider the original design of the pools
when they're either renovating them
or making a pool from scratch, and hoping that they'll
include these LED strips when they do that.
Now that's probably enough of the swimming for now,
but now let's move on to the cycling, and I'm going to start
with the Saris Plate that I saw out in Kona.
Right, so here at the Saris stand this is their, well,
soon to be released MP1 Nfinity Plate.
Now this is another attempt to make indoor cycling
that little bit more real.
So, this plate actually has lateral movement.
So that's on a leaf spring.
We've got six degrees either side.
We've also got some rollers,
so we've got fore and aft movement here, but essentially,
the big thing here, is when we get up out of the saddle,
or we're sprinting, we can just ride
like we are on the road.
Yeah, I think this is a really cool move,
given the growth and popularity
of indoor training at the moment.
There's a lot being invested into this market,
so the more real we can make it, the better.
And with people like Swift introducing things
like steering into their indoor training and then this,
it's getting that bit closer
to feeling like riding outdoors.
Or, at least, it's a lot different from
the old dumb-trainers that a lot of us used to train on.
Okay, my next bit of tech,
is one that is fairly close to my heart.
It's the old Canyon Speedmax.
So I guess it's no secret I've got a lot of love
for that bike, but unfortunately,
I do not have the most up to date cock pit
on my own personal Canyon Speedmax.
But fortunately, Fraser got to have a look firsthand
at the newest one out in Oceanside earlier this year.
- They've cleaned up aerodynamically
how it looks from the front end.
So as before in previous models
they had Taro stacks for the arm cups.
They've taken them away, moved them inline,
so they are now sitting above the aero bars,
which just means this thing is even more aerodynamic
and faster than it was.
- Yeah that is some slippery looking stuff,
and such clever design and integration.
But whilst we're talking about aerodynamics,
how about this one?
Again from Fraser, but this time out at Challenge Roth.
- Right, so we're at the Swiss Side booth now
and this is some very exciting kit that we've got here.
This is F1, Formula One technology brought over to cycling.
And this here is Swiss Side's pressure measurement rake
as they call it. So as you can see, it sits here
on the back of the seat tube, behind the rider
when they're riding out in the real world,
and the whole point of this is the rider can go
into the wind tunnel and get measurements registered
in there, in the wind tunnel.
- Okay it's not our usual piece of mass-produced tech.
In fact, I'm fairly sure there's only a couple
of those that exist.
But one that you can buy, and also came out earlier
this year, is Sram Axs.
Yeah, love it or hate it, it's hard to look past it.
Now reinventing the wheel might be
a slight overstatement here, but it's certainly
on its way to doing that.
For starters, it's a 12 speed set-up,
which again isn't necessarily anything game-changing,
but what is is it's gear ratios.
Now they've managed to develop and design
a new freehub body.
They've taken the design from their offroad XD Driver
and they've managed to now put
a smaller 10 tooth sprocket onto this new freehub body.
And what that does is actually increases the range
ever so slightly on both the easier end
and the harder end of the gears.
But to do this they've had to make the chain
ever so slightly thinner to accommodate these 12 sprockets,
and by doing that they want to make sure
that they still maintain the strength of the chain,
so they've actually added material
to the top of the chain, which has brought
about this rather cool-looking
and eye-catching flat top design to this chain.
Now, moving back to bikes,
and a bike that you may well have forgotten about
given its release back in March of this year,
the Cervelo P5 Disc.
Now the P5 was already a very popular bike amongst athletes,
so it's no surprise to see quite a lot of these newer bikes,
the P5 Disc at a lot of races this year.
And, fortunately, we got a first hand look at it,
very early on this year, the championship
with David McNamee's bike.
Now it's been actually seven years since
the release of the P5,
and Cervelo have completely overhauled its design,
obviously, most notably with the hydraulic disc brakes,
but they've also made a number of other changes
which we'll go through in more detail later in this video.
They've improved the stiffness
in the front end by 22%,
26% increased stiffness in the bottom bracket.
And they've also improved the lightness of this frame
by 18% and in fact they've actually saved 350 grams
in the frame set alone on its previous model.
Okay, quickly, one more bit of bike tech
before we move onto the run.
And how about the Rotor INspider power meter
that I saw out in Kona.
It's a rather clever bit of design.
So here is the power meter, the chain rings, the spider.
Here is the axle.
You can slot it in as so,
and then you can swap out the crank.
So you can go for whatever size you like,
which is quite convenient for triathletes
maybe trying out different size crank lengths.
And this just slots on like that.
So it is actually a single-sided power meter
but obviously it can replicate that power
onto the other side so you get overall power for both legs.
The nice thing with this, is it's also compatible
with one bi and two bi.
And in addition to that, the power meter actually
auto-calibrates as you go.
It's got a built-in thermometer
and also detects in changes in barometric pressure.
So as you're riding along and the temperature changes,
or you change altitude as you're riding,
it will auto-calibrate for you as you go.
Now, moving on from cycling and on to running,
and it would be foolish to ignore
the insurgence of carbon plates.
Now this technology isn't anything new,
but Nike or Nike have really stamped their mark here
with a well-developed and performing shoe.
Now it's a couple years ago since they first released
their shoe with the carbon plating,
but this year they released their newest iteration,
the Nike ZoomX Vaporfly Next%,
which we've seen a lot of athletes using,
and triathletes using, particularly so at Kona,
a heck of a lot of them using it.
But, we also had Kipchoge wearing his rather fancy shoe,
in his sub-two hour attempt.
What other brands are following in their stride,
such as Hoka with their rather popular Carbon X shoe,
and we've also seen a number of prototypes
from certain other brands who are doing a similar thing.
But moving on from there, and now
onto that rather funny looking Omius head band,
which we've seen quite a few athletes wearing
this past year or so.
Now if we were just to pour a little bit of water
onto the back of these pads, this special compound here,
which you can see raises out of the headband,
increases the skin surface area by five times.
So when we wear this on our head,
it's already really quite cold.
If we were to run along
and the wind passing through this compound,
it should really feel quite cold,
which is obviously really important
for somewhere like here in Kona,
with the heat and the humidity
the athletes are going to experience on race day.
Yeah they were certainly popular with the pros
this year in Kona, including their wrist-based ones
with the same technology built into them.
Now, moving onto another product
that's really jumped up this year,
the Amp Human Performance substance.
Let me explain.
Now essentially this is bicarbonate soda.
Okay, it sounds bitter, pretty odd, baking soda.
A lot of athletes have actually used this
to help buffer lactic acid,
to help reduce the effects of lactic acid
when you're training.
I used to use this actually with British Triathlon.
But it does have side effects.
It can effect your gut.
Also, it just tastes disgusting to digest.
So, they have cleverly managed to put this
into a formula that tricks the skin into absorbing it.
So in here, we've actually got a fatty substance
that the skin accepts that fatty substance
and within that is encapsulated the bicarb.
That soaks into the skin and is absorbed into the body,
into the muscles, into the bloodstream,
and has the same effects.
Clever stuff, eh?
Well as you can imagine it's been pretty tricky
whittling it down to just that many bits of tech
that have been released this year.
We featured so much tech on GTN over the past year,
so do make sure you have a look
through some of our previous videos,
but if we have missed anything this year,
then please do let us know
in the comments section below.
I've actually whittled this list down further
to a short list of just four bits of tech.
So I've got the Nike Vaporfly Next% shoes,
I've got the Sram Axis group set,
the Form goggles, and the Cervelo P5 Disc.
And you can enter into the poll just above
and let us know which one you think
is the best bit of tech to be released this year.
If you've enjoyed today's video, hit that thumbs up button,
if you like to see more videos from GTN
just click on the globe and subscribe.
If you'd like to see our tech from Kona,
you can see the video just here.
And if you'd like to see our best triathlon upgrades,
or value upgrades, you can see that
by clicking just down here.