Thursday, September 15, 2022

HRM vs the strap vs the GPS head unit

For those who look at my Strava feed it delivered some interesting results back at the end of August on what should have been a nice easy recovery / keep the legs spinning ride, essentially my heart rate came back at double what it should be.

Of course I didn't realise this until I got home, hit stop and save and some very strange results appeared on my Garmin 1030 Plus, new max rate and a crazy effort level for what was essentially a low speed spin round what is used as TT track near our house.


OK so your first thought is did I suddenly get very ill somewhere as this makes no sense, the something more rational sets in and you start troubleshooting, something we started when I worked at Sun was a methodology for this, it doesn't just apply to tech, it applies to all walks of life.


So what could be broken well only three things in this loop the HRM, the strap, the Garmin GPS unit. The HRM has a battery in it, it could need changing, so change the HRM, still the same result, could be the GPS head unit, still same result, so must be the strap, but that is strange never had one of those fail before and sure enough it was the strap. Bit of googling later discover this can happen, who knew, apparently the solution is to wash them, which I haven't tried yet. Doesn't seem to be any logical reason why, they are obviously not as passive as I thought.

I did also x-check with GPS watch I use for skiing and that verified the new results were accurate.


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