Peloton exercise bikes

I’m glad you liked it, hopefully it can help get some folks on the path to injury-free cycling. There are literally entire books on the biomechanics of cycling, I’m just barely scratching the surface here. If you want to ride a lot but keep getting unwarranted pain or injury, it’s worth the money to have a professional fitting done.

I’ve got 45 days in a row and counting! Nothing too intense… I usually do 20 minute rides, occasionally 30.

We’re heading out of town away from the bike next weekend so I guess I’ll have to do some little workouts on the app if I want to keep my daily streak going.

I’ve noticed that with the arrival of Spring and the growing sense that the pandemic is over, the number of Zwift riders has fallen off a cliff. Is there any way to know if Peloton is going through the same cycle (no pun intended)? I haven’t checked any of their SEC filings. My hypothesis is that the Peloton market is more like the market for gyms, and will be more resilient, while Zwift is more of an off-season cyclist market and isn’t going to recover well in the US.

The hours I usually ride (8pm to 10pm Pacific Time), during winter there would be 5,000+ people on, sometimes up to 7500 (when I looked at similar hours in Europe, there would be 22,000 - 25,000 people on - too bad that is just after lunch for me). Now users have been dropping by 50% a week. Fridays are always a little lower, pandemic be damned, but tonight there were only ~1750 on, world-wide!

Many Zwift users are cyclists who use it to stay in shape and do a little training during the winter months, but apparently most stayed on during the warmer months of 2020 due to the pandemic. But lots of them chatted and posted about longing to be back out on the actual road, and now I think they are. You earn xp and in-game currency more quickly riding in groups, so kind of a bummer to see the virtual roads so empty. On the other hand, that means less competition, and tonight I won my first green jersey for the best time on a sprint segment (you keep winner jerseys for an hour, unless you are beaten or log off). It helped a lot that there were only 68 people on the timer list! I’m usually very happy to make the top 30% when up against the usual 350-500 people, there are always a bunch of A-class riders who blow my doors off (or whatever gets blown off a bike).

So Peloton folks, have you seen any decrease in the number of live classes, or attendees? Is there any way to see how many others are online at the same time? They sold so many bikes during the pandemic that they quit advertising in the US, and the stock (PTON) peaked at $169, giving them a market cap of almost $50 billion. But they were still losing money, and now the short-sellers have come after them saying they won’t replace gyms once the pandemic is over. PTON crashed hard starting about the middle of February to mid-March, and has been bouncing around $100-$115 since.

Zwift isn’t even in the same ballpark of cash and size. It is still private, and has received about $1 billion in investment. If their user base (especially in the US) drops off significantly & permanently over the warm months of 2021, they will surely have cash flow problems if they don’t already. At $15/month, they aren’t really raking it in. They are just starting to move into hardware design & eventual sales (they have been hiring hardware people for a few months, and just acquired a company that makes electric motors - the smaller alternative to a flywheel in a smart trainer), but they are a long way from being a competitor to Peleton. Plus, the biggest smart trainer manufacturer (who also have been selling all they can make during the pandemic) just hired a reasonably-sized software team that looks like it will be making a Zwift competitor.

I feel like I am talking about MMORPGs in 2005.

I dropped Zwift because I started to listen to audio books while riding and determined that I was no longer watching the screen. I am on a Spin Bike so I mainly used Zwift for something to watch while riding. But is watching worth 15 bucks a month? I switched to the RideSocial App on iOS which lets me see something as I ride and I can choose to pay one time for the routes I want.

I then used the 15 bucks I was spending on a Valheim Server.

I’ve still never had the confidence to join a live class.

It’s crazy Pelaton fought so hard against this. It’s even crazier they didn’t design a safeguard in the first place; it’s common on other treadmills.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/05/05/peloton-treadmill-recall/

non-paywall BBC

Goddamn it the reply bots are out in full force on the BBC twitter - ‘it’s not a product problem, it’s a parenting problem!’

Our bike has been clicking for quite a while. I looked around and the diagnosis seemed clear: faulty bearings. Apparently Peloton has had a big problem with them. So my girlfriend, in whose name the bike is, submitted a support ticket and the answer came back…you need to tighten the stabilizer bolts. Come the fuck on, the bolts were as tight as could be, which we checked and responded, and they said ok it’s probably a bad bearing we’ll fix it. Well, today the damned thing froze up entirely. My girlfriend loves to tinker with things so she took it apart as much as she could, which was not very much, and there is a weird white and black dust/shavings everywhere. The noise when it first started really sounded to me like the belt creaking, and looking at it now it seems fairly obvious to me that they assembled it improperly and the belt wore against some part of the mechanism and the resulting dust got into the hub and clogged the bearings. Thanks a lot, assholes! There goes my 137 day streak!

Just do some stretching workouts on the phone app to keep your streak alive!

Well as I told my girlfriend, the streak for me is not about the little blue dot, it’s about having ridden the bike.

We’ve had our bike for a few months now (thank you, tax return) as a replacement for the other stuff we dropped during the pandemic.

Really like it. The workouts are tough, but engaging. Classes don’t feel repetitive because they all tend to do different things with cadence, resistance, and breaks. The visual feedback of the numbers on the screen offer a bit of a feeling of gamification, especially if you repeat a class to beat your prior score.

I’ve been working through the Christine D’Ercole backlog. She’s 49 so feels like more of a peer, acts like she is working as hard as I am (even though I know she is in infinitely better shape), and is low-key but inspirational. Sam Yo is also great for a very chill vibe. Most of the other instructors I’ve tried are way too peppy for me.

Any experiences with the strength classes? I used to do strength stuff with a trainer but that was a casualty of COVID. Wondering what I’d need for a decent kit of weights. I used to do a lot of free weight stuff (sometimes fairly heavy), and I’m not sure how much guidance the instructors are giving on using appropriate weights for your fitness level.

God damn, less than two months after they replaced the thing and it’s clicking again. Frankly, I would never recommend anyone buy one of these overpriced pieces of crap.

So the internet is out and I thought ok I’ll get my bike ride in.

NOPE!

Apparently nothing is stored locally on the giant tablet, not your profile, nothing. So other than in the raw “pedals go around” sense, in the absence of the internet the bike is totally useless. Can’t see what resistance you’re even on, let alone do anything else. Is this what it’s like if you let your subscription lapse, a bike that has near zero actual functionality?

Whenever our internet goes out I curl into a ball in bed and cry myself to sleep. I thought everyone did this?

I kid, of course, but I never considered the problems of trying to use a Peloton offline. I would more or less expect it to be useless without the subscription; I knew what I was getting into in that regard. But it’s disappointing there’s no way to operate it even in a reduced capacity offline.

Wow, and now I will never ever buy one of these.

Yeah I mean obviously I’m not expecting to have most of the functionality available, but without internet access (or, presumably but not confirmed, an active subscription) you can’t even see what resistance the thing is set to.

Oh, I already mentioned that, I see. Most everything else could be gotten around, but not…not really that. I guess you could just crank the knob until it “feels about right” and then use a stopwatch and make a mark on a calendar, but you could probably do that with a $50 bike, and honestly the build quality is just not there to charge $2000 for what I increasingly think of as the Tesla of exercise bikes.

Yeah, the whole point (and strength) of the Peloton is the content platform. If that’s not online, the bike loses its whole goddamn raison d’etre. If you lose internet connectivity with any frequency, I wouldn’t recommend getting one. So this strikes me as a bit of an unfair complaint even though I get how frustrating life is when your internet is down.

My Smart TV is connected to the internet and is able to stream a bunch of shows natively. But if my internet is down, it works just like any old dumb TV; I can still use it to play video games from my Playstation console or plug in a DVD player or just watch shows over the air with an antenna. The Peloton should be at least as functional as a standard high-end exercise bike without the internet.

I have a Rule of Life that applies to things like hotel rooms and restaurants: “The more you pay, the more you pay.”, i.e. a room at a cheap roadside motel often includes coffee in my room, single-use bathroom amenities, and a continental breakfast. All that stuff is not only extra but extra pricey at a high-end hotel. Seems the same thing applies to exercise bikes.

Well, if exercise is the goal, you can still use the pedals and get your exercise. Just like your TV analogy.