I tried the breakway app as I saw it in the settings here in Intervals. Oddly when I had it log into intervals, it pulls in my workout for the day and shows the proper watt targets. When I go to start, my trainer adjusts to the inital watt target 185, then about 5 seconds, breakway drops down to 26 watt and is clearly not following the training plan that was loaded (shown by the graph).
Is there some setting I’ve turned on that’s causing this or something I need to enable? What is odd is that it ramps up to the correct watts for the first few seconds and then it turns it way down for some reason.
The reason for the Drop is a feature called “Avoid Spiral Of Death” and it detects your Trainer’s Flywheel speed. When it’s < 4ms then this feature will kick in an it will scale the power sent to the trainer by x% of Power Target based on the detected flywheel speed.
Option:
Disable the feature.When you stop for a toilet break at 500w, you will need to start mashing the pedals
Prior to pressing START, start pedaling so the flywheel has some speed.
Ok I tried it without the spiral of death and it didn’t drop down the resistance like before, but in a quick test that I made…in the 2 min zone 4 work it spiked the resistance to the max - to where I couldn’t pedal really at all. Jumped from 280w to over 450w. I stuck it out (sort of) till the next section and it dropped back to what it was supposed to do. I’m not sure if this was some issue with my trainer, or some blip in the data stream or what. I’ll give it another go on a real training ride rather than a random test I created.
this is interesting…
can you share the workout you created?
also - what trainer is it?
PowerMatch enabled?
is the BottomMost chart the cadence? This almost looks like the trainer is kicking in it’s spiral of death functionality where cadence is going down and trainer respond by increasing resistance in an effort to get your power & cadence back up.
Yes the bottom is cadence - but the only reason it dropped is because I can’t pedal 75-85 cadence at 450 watts. The power graph dropped off because I was only turning at about 40-45 at that point.
I’m not sure if you want the zwo file - or just see what was built in intervals I’m not sure I can add a physical attachment to send the zwo file so here’s what it looks like:
I almost wonder if there was a momentary loss of connection to the trainer to read the power…there’s that slight dip in power right before the spike…I wonder if it read a power reading of 0 watts for a second during a connection drop…and therefor it ramped up the resistance…but didn’t come back down because I couldn’t actually pedal very well for it to realize it was too much resistance.
I see that yours is not a true-blue FTMS trainer, so there might be some discrepancies that may not have been taken care of.
let’s get some logs…
go to SETTINGS, all the way down there’s a box called “developer” please input
LOGPOWERMATCH
into the box. This will collect the power targets sent to the trainer.
i am also noticing this where the cadence dropped down to zero. Usually this would be where Avoid Spiral Of Death kicks in and progressively ramps you back up to the power target.
Without the Avoid Spiral Of Death feature, the trainer’s built in algo kicks in and ramps up the resistance. The longer you take to get up to the power target, the more resistance the trainer sets. It’s a vicious cycle.
Ok I’ll post it on my next scheduled ride - unfortunately not until next week.
One question on the spiral of death - above you said it detects flywheel speed - since I’m not on a traditional trainer, I don’t have a flywheel speed being sent to the app - ever. Is the spiral of death really on flywheel speed or pedal cadence - I wonder if this is causing the dip and the spike, for certain you’ll need logs but I wonder if it’s expecting some value (with it off or on) for flywheel speed and my trainer is not sending it at all.
I was able to do a ride today ahead of plan, a full ride…no issues at all, no random power spikes or runaway resistance. I had a dropout of the connection to the trainer/power but that didn’t cause any issues. The graph just dropped to 0 for a second or two.
I have log file you can get to here if you want to look at it even though nothing went wrong - although perhaps knowing that I have a homegrown ‘trainer’ that spiral of death isn’t working for me…as soon as you turn that on even if I have a cadence of 85+ and watts of 150 - 300 it drops the resistance right down to 20 as soon as that’s enabled - seems like whatever algorithm that is using, doesn’t apply for my device.
Ride Graph (bars are from top to bottom : Power, 30s Power, HR, Cadence)
Glad that everything works great. I would consider this as SOLVED
You are right… Based on the logs SS2K is indeed sending the flywheel speed (as it should based on the FTMS protocol). But may not be reflective of the actual flywheel speed. (Vary between 1.1m/s to 1.4m/s which is way below the 4m/s for Avoid Spiral Of Death to kick in)
Also, since your trainer is sending flywheel speed (instead of not sending at all), my algorithm won’t default to ignoring the speed number.
Next time, if you do happen to get the situation where the power gets out of hand, try using the +/- button to RE-SEND a new power target to the Trainer. When power match is turned off, the Trainer takes over maintaining the power target once sent at interval start.
Yeah it’s pretty slick - a few years ago I got into indoor training (I’ve never been a serious cyclist - just a weekend warrior mountain biker)…I had a spin bike laying around and the SS2k makes it easy to follow a prescribed workout/zwo file, etc. Also great if your traveling for work (and you have power pedals you can take)…I had someone with a nice printer print it up for me. A couple hundred bucks seems to give me the same workout I’d get from a $1200 Wahoo kicker (plus a bike I’d need to buy to put on it unless I did indoor training on an old mtb).
