This Week in Tech: Strava Strategy Reveal, Colors Make Matching Easy, AI Training in the WorldTour, and Collaborative Route Planning

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Sweet Protection launches special edition color

Sweet protection has a bit of a reputation as an influencer friendly helmet brand. Having spent a good amount of time actually wearing the helmets, I’d call that unfair. The helmets are high quality and comfortable but it is true that they are stylish too. It doesn’t hurt that if you want to match PAS Normal colors you can jump to the PAS Normal site, instead of Sweet Protection, to find colorways that get updates for the season.

Now there’s a new colorway direct from Sweet Protection called Hyper Violet. The option is available with across seven helmets, a pair of sunglasses, and a set of goggles covering everything from casual, road, gravel, and mountain bike. Personally my favorite is the aero helmet with the fade design for $300 (no upcharge for the color).

Check out the Sweet Protection website for more info and ordering. – JR

Vekta Announces New Partnerships with Pro Cycling Teams

I already covered Vekta in a previous this week in tech and not a whole lot has changed. It’s a slick looking AI software package to help analyze your riding and training. There’s some cool data analysis stuff going on like AI generated training sessions and automatic threshold analysis. It’s also not completely different from other systems such as Xert or FasCat coaching which I covered in depth.

What is new with Vekta is that it’s being applied to WordTour racing. Arkéa – B&B Hotels, GreenEDGE Cycling, and FDJ – Suez are all planning to use the system going forward and that could mean a big AI breakthrough. There are other teams using AI but it’s been rather hush-hush so far. Now Vekta and three teams are saying publicly that the system is getting use. As much as I dive into my own training, I’m excited to see what that means for the evolution of this particular AI software.

For more information visit the Vekta website. – JR

Xert introduces durability metric

Speaking of Xert, the brand also has a number of updates this week. If you aren’t familiar with Xert it is an AI based training platform but it comes from a time before AI and that’s still the core feature set. The basic concept is this idea of a moving and changing FTP. You don’t have to do a test and instead just absolutely bury yourself occasionally. Once that happens Xert will pull your FTP and it will instantly start to decrease. Ride more and it will decrease slower. Next time you bury yourself the system will recognize it again and if you’ve gone beyond your old number it increases, if not it decreases.

Part of that system is the idea of a bucket of available power. You can use that bucket all at once or you can dip into it over and over without recovery. Either way that bucket didn’t change over the course of a ride. This week there’s an update to handle that differently. Xert calls it durability and it represents that you probably can’t hold the same FTP at the beginning and end of a long ride. Now Xert tracks that decrease and helps train it.

I noticed my FTP dropped over 30% during a seven hour ride. I’m definitely going to want to check out how to do better than that in the future. If you’d like to check this out as well, visit the Xert website. – JR

Ride with GPS launches collaborative route planning

Every ride tracking system out there has a solution for building routes and pushing it to a bike computer. You can find it in Garmin, Hammerhead, Strava, and our own Map My Ride. Up until now all of those systems have been based around a single person experience.

Ride with GPS is announcing a system that lets multiple people work on a route together. Now you can create a route then invite collaborators. Previously those collaborators would have had to create a duplicate route and make changes then share it back to the group. Now everyone can work on a single route and saved changes will show up for everyone else instantly. You can leave notes during the process and if something doesn’t end up working you can restore previous route versions.

For more info check out the Ride With GPS website. – JR

Strava acquires the massively popular Runna app; here’s what it means for cyclists

Strava has purchased Runna, an AI-powered coaching app for running. The purchase feels like a win-win for both Strava and Runna users alike. Runna gets access to Strava’s massive running community and data, while Strava gets to add an in-platform adaptive training plan for runners to supplement the hardly-used static training plans Strava already offers.

No, Strava isn’t going to try and push a local run club onto us cyclists (at least, I hope not). But what this could mean is the addition of adaptive training expanding to other sports, with cycling an obvious target. It won’t be easy–there’s competition all over the place for cycling-specific training plans–but considering the sheer number of cyclists already with a Strava Premium subscription, this would make for a massive value add for folks who already questioned whether a Strava Premium membership was worth paying for. -AH

Finally! Hammerhead launches new colors of its Karoo Color Shells

The phrase “Hammerhead Karoo Color Shells” sounds like something straight out of the new Mario Kart World Direct racing game, but no, this is still cycling related. Hammerhead has launched a trio of new colors for third generation-Karoo computer users to customize their computers. The three colors–Ascent Purple, Frost Gray, and Haze Blue–belong to Hammerhead’s Elevation Series. And its not just the outer edge of the computer either, as the buttons and USB covers can be mixed and matched as you’d like.

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t heavily into the Ascent Purple colorway myself. At $44.99, however, I’ll have to really, really dig that color. Learn more at hammerhead.io. -AH