Recently I bought a printer for our household. It is the first printer I´ve owned for almost 20 years, over the past two decades I used the printing services at my school, university or at work. Now Future Wife and me are both taking a break from work for a few months and suddenly we won´t have access to a printer and figured it might be worth getting one. If your only first-hand experience with a home printer is from 20 years ago your experience with wifi printers of today is solid confirmation that you are living in the future. It took like 10 minutes to set up and is now running smooth. It was cheap. It even scans and makes copies and whatnot and can order new ink cartridges by itself.





So I was thinking, if technology is as advanced as it is, why is it still so difficult to properly and seamlessly collect and analyze my training data? And couldn´t I and my fellow athletes not make more with the data we are producing day in day out?





When I go out for a ride I usually take my phone and my GPS-watch with me. Sometimes I use an additional heart rate monitor and sooner or later I will probably consider getting a power meter. I use the same watch when I am out running or swimming and additionally take the HR sensor sometimes with me running. At home I have a bike trainer which transmits speed and cadence.





The watch syncs primarily to a web service provided by the watch manufacturer. This is my second watch of this type and of a different make to the one before, so plenty of my old data is stored with another proprietary web service. The home trainer also syncs to an app that came with the sensor and the optional power meter may or may not be of a different make altogether. To bring it all together I am syncing these proprietary systems to a web service independent of hardware. And because I like fiddling with data and do my own analysis of my progress and performance I also have my own tools in numbers / excel to sift through when I have a question.





With the best will in the world, this all seems like there is room for improvement. At this point I became curious how other athletes handle these things and after discussion with friends I decided to use a simple online survey to get a better picture.





The survey was using Google Forms and the link was publicly shared on r/triathlon, r/samplesize and in the electronics section of MTB-News.de. A survey dummy is provided here . As several participants have pointed out, the survey wasn´t designed perfectly and the results should be taken with a grain of salt. Some things to consider before we interpret the data are:





For athletes that aren´t logging data at all the survey offered no reply option. So the replies are either only representing a subset of athletes which are logging data or the non-loggers chose random answers.

Being distributed publicly the survey is vulnerable to joke replies, trolling and people submitting their reply more than once.

Several questions allow for "check all that apply" answers which leads to a multitude of possible combinations. The sample size is definitely way to small to give any indication on sensor / equipment combos and can only indicate the use of types of sensors among all participants.

It is a survey on the internet, so the participants represent a subset of athletes with at least some interest in information technology, social media and / or internet platforms. No conclusion can be drawn with regards to the set of all athletes.

So what have we learned?



By the time I am writing this there are 256 responses in total, 240 of which chose first language "English". Since the German responses are very few and more geared towards mountain biking I´ll stick to the analysis of all english speaking respondents for now.



More than 80% of participants ride a road bike, 40% (also) have a TT bike. Another 17.9% have a MTB and few also have a big bike or CX.



The majority of participants spends more than 150 hrs per year riding heir bike, Kudos for that!



Time spent on bike per year in hours

Type of sensor in use Not surprisingly people use a wide variety of sensors and gadgets during those long hours on two wheels. The majority of 71.7% owns and uses a "Smart-/GPS-Watch", another 61.7% also use a heart rate monitor. Only one fifth uses a power meter, surprisingly twice that use a cadence sensor. Bike computers with GPS have already overtaken non-GPS devices (22.9% vs. 27.5%).



Almost 90% of riders have their eyes on speed and distance while riding and 70.4% use heart rate. Interestingly, 122 or 50.8% of riders use cadence (compared to only 107 who claimed to use a cadence sensor) and 54 or 22.5% use power (compared to 49 claiming to use a power meter). Might be virtual power curves involved or just the shortcomings of anonymous internet polls. Either way, power and cadence do play a significant role, at least for reddit triathletes.



Use of data during rides





The next question asked for what else people do with their data. The fact that only 66.3% claim to use ti while riding suggests that the poll wasn´t designed well at this point (what did the remaining third answer earlier? Or does "not using data" not include looking at it?). The majority of 88.8% uses their data to track and document performance, progress and achievements. 65.4% use it to guide their training, 38.3% use ti to share their adventures with someone else and 23.8% track the wear on their gear.





And where is it all going? Only 8.8% log their training manually, 10.8% do their own analysis with other tools (which requires having access to raw data mind you). 73.3% of rider use a web service to log and analyze and 65% (also) use a proprietary web service that came with their device (i.e. Garmin Connect, Polar Flow).





What the data is being used for

Finally the poll allowed for open answers to what is bothering people. One theme that got mentioned several times is the issue of data migration and access to raw data. It seems that at least some athletes (myself included) wish it would be easier to consolidate data across different platform and to get access to their raw data to do something else with it. A version of "if it´s not on Strava it didn´t happen" got mentioned several times. A few athletes mentioned that uploading could be made easier or more efficient and some expressed a desire for more options to modify / tag / group activities. What´s worth noting is that while the majority didn´t reply to this final question at all, only two explicitly said "No comment / no room for improvement".



