So this was the first session I’ve run through the telemetry tool since teaching it to read heart rate, and also the first one where the numbers came out so far from every other session that I went back and checked whether something had broken.
It hadn’t. This was an evening on the Air cable at Hove Lagoon, which is the deeper one where air tricks are allowed and which currently has a kicker and a disco pad on it, and the wind had got up enough that it was hard work — a lot more standing on the dock having a chat than actually riding, which the GPS is rather unkind about: of the 21 and a half minutes of footage I came away with, only about six and a half minutes of it was me moving faster than walking pace. Two of the five chapters turned out to be me talking to people with the camera still running, which the tool now spots and skips on its own rather than solemnly reporting nothing happened for ten minutes.
The interesting part is what happened in the six and a half minutes I was actually riding. Eleven airs, which is a third of what I managed on a good session, but the median airtime came out at 0.68 seconds against 0.40 to 0.44 on every previous session, and the best was 0.77s which is the longest I’ve recorded. Eight of the eleven cleared half a second, which is the same number as a session with thirty airs in it. So: far fewer attempts, and almost all of them big.
Some of that is the cable rather than me. Air has the kicker and the deeper water, and my two Air sessions have topped out at 0.75s and 0.77s while the two on Tech sat at 0.59s and 0.64s, which is a much tidier split than I’d expect from anything I was doing differently. But the median moving from 0.40 to 0.68 between two Air sessions is a bigger jump than the cable can explain on its own, so I’ll take some of it.
The other thing the tool now does is tell the difference between a landing I rode away from and one that put me in the water, which it does by looking at what the GPS says a few seconds afterwards — carry on at 20-odd kph and you rode it out, drop to walking pace and you’re swimming. Six impacts on this session came out as swimming, including a rather good 0.68s air where I landed it, held it for about two seconds and then comprehensively did not ;-)
That one shows up nicely in the data actually — the air itself reads as “unclear” because I was still moving when it looked, and then there’s a 10.5G impact two seconds later that reads as a definite fall. The tool now cuts both of those into one clip rather than two nearly identical ten second ones, which took me an embarrassingly long time to notice was a problem.
And for the first time there’s heart rate on it, off the Polar strap and lined up with the footage by timestamp, which needs no faffing about because the GoPro stamps everything with GPS satellite time and the Polar stamps everything with UTC and they simply agree. 149 average across the riding and a max of 164, with the biggest airs all landing somewhere between 154 and 160. Worth noting Polar itself reckons the session averaged 109, but that’s counting all the standing about, which rather makes the point about the wind.
Still haven’t ridden the pipe on the Tech cable. Next time, probably, assuming it’s less windy.