A First Look at Saris’ PowerAgent 7
by George Gilliland
As in other dysfunctional areas of my character, my flirtation with “power” has all too quickly developed into a full-fledged relationship. After innocently going to watch the Harlem crit in June and finding it unbearable to stand on the sidelines, even at the advanced age of 50, I decided to give racing one more try. I renewed my license (now lapsed 18 years) in July, and by August I was full-fledged: I had bought a PowerTap wheel and started training 21st century style: a graying geezer with a $1200 rear wheel capable of documenting my aging process in relentless one-second tics. In exactly seven weeks I went from instinctively reaching for down-tube shifters on the windy side of Floyd to a more modern cycling dilemma: how does one get one’s PowerTap data onto one’s Mac?
To me, Microsoft represents a persistent malaise to the human condition that the world has yet to conquer, much like famine and the common cold, but still, I wanted to view that data so badly I had nearly resigned myself to make a limited pact with the devil and purchase a used Windows laptop and Cycling Peaks software.
But just in the nick of time a smart racer/student at MIT by the name of Sean Rhey hacked together a freeware C application called Golden Cheetah that could download and display PowerTap ride data and also generate a cumulative Critical Power graph, all natively on the Mac OS. Pretty basic, but good enough until Sean had more free time to add some of the features he promised, namely intervals. Also, rumor had it that Saris was working on their own cross-platform Java-based version of PowerAgent, due out in October, that would sport more features and run natively on not only Mac but also on Linux machines (whose usage is growing quickly in Europe). Apparently Sean had to hit the books and has disappeared since Labor Day, so I pinned my hopes on Saris.
Finally, Saris released PowerAgent 7 last week to coincide with the release of their wireless PowerTap hub. Within minutes of its appearance on the Cyclops web site. I had downloaded it and started using the first buggy release, which hung on download. But 24 hours later Saris had a patched version up that works as it should. Being that this is New York, where presumably there are more Mac Users with PowerTap wheels than in the world at large, perhaps the release of PowerAgent 7 is a relevant event. I certainly was for me! So I decided to contribute my mini review of PowerAgent 7 for those potential three to thirteen other Metro Area Mac users who might presently be trying to decide on what to do about the issue of power meters.
Turkey Race Field Test: PowerAgent 7 came out literally three days before the last race of the season, a turn marshalling day for me, so I quickly changed my plans, pinned on my number, and sweet-talked my wife into marshalling for me so I could download an actual race and try it out.
Windows users who have already used the old PowerAgent already know that, on download, it divides a ride into slices that they call “activities” so that useless dead spots in the ride can be discarded and “good slices” merged before saving a ride data file, thus showing a more accurate representation of your effort for that ride. The uninitiated Mac User will find this weird at first. But the logic will immediately become apparent once you bring back data from a race day and download it. All the unwanted “activities” such as your ride to and from the park, race sign-in, warmup, peeing in the bushes, waiting on the line etc. can be deleted before saving your ride. In other words you can isolate and merge just the data you’re interested in (in this case a race) before saving the ride.
From the ride display I was then able to select the data for each lap as a separate interval, then name and save these intervals and view them separately from a convenient scroll bar (screenshot 1). They were pretty easy to highlight and select from the ride display, since Cat’s Paw is a clearly identifiable peak, and Central Park has a distinctive repeating pattern of peaks and valleys. Nice for cold race days when it’s hard to hit the interval buttons in your neoprane gloves! I was then able to scroll down and select each Lap and view it separately (screenshot 2: you can see from the anemic Lap 5 numbers that the field has now given up on chasing down the break. . . perhaps riding home with a frozen turkey on one’s back is not so desirable after all).
Other Features: Aside from being able to select and permanently save intervals within a ride and scroll down to view them (PowerAgent’s best feature), each ride has a clean and attractive summary window where at a glance you can view a bar chart of your power distribution by work zone, a bar chart of your heart rate distribution by work zone, and a line graph of your cumulative vs. current Peak Power curve by interval (Mean Maximal Power in WKO+). And of course you can view a summary of all your maximums and averages, as well as your peak power by the usual standard intervals. You can also enter your own wistful comments on that that day’s effort.
Missing features: If you’ve already tried CyclingPeaks you will immediately notice that it lacks a few things you might now consider essential, such as:
1. normalized power
2. data smoothing
3. ability to de-select parameters from display (i.e.:
power, heart, cadence, speed, etc.)
4. user-defined values for graph axis
5. expanded views of ride segments that can be zoomed in on (although interval selection is more or less the same thing)
For Windows users who are already used to the high level of obsession that CyclingPeaks allows, PowerAgent 7 might seem a tad bare bones, but for Mac Users who had no way to use their PowerTap natively this is quite a nice little Xmas gift! And gift it is indeed, since anyone can download it for free on the Saris website. Like many Java-based apps, it’s a bit funky in it’s interface behavior, but it’s stable and very usable. It’s also attractively designed and very easy on the eyes. It has the clean, streamlined look of a Mac application. You can read it fast and quickly see where your fitness is going at a glance.
Where does that leave us?: If you’re a Mac user and you’ve already invested your time/money in getting Virtual PC and CyclingPeaks working on your Mac (or perhaps even bought a separate Windows machine just for that purpose!) you’ll probably want to just stick with that. But if you’re a dedicated MacUser just now buying, or thinking about buying a PowerTap, or if you find that installing Windows is akin to pulling the “Red” lever on election day, then PowerAgent 7 is definitely a viable way to immediately get started on your power training without having to confront a moral dilemma. Or conversely, if you’re a Windows user and are thinking about getting PowerTap, PowerAgent 7 should now provide you with adequate software out of the box. And if Saris decides to improve it by adding some of the aforementioned missing features to make it more user-customizable, it will be truly all you will ever need to train with PowerTap.
Of course there will be those who will eventually feel the need to deepen their mean/maximal obsession with the ever narrowing minutia of their ride data and what it might mean to them, temporally, periodically, and cosmically. . . and will no doubt eventually buy Windows and WKO+ anyway. To that unhappy end, PowerPeaks will still export ride data into .csv files that can be imported into CyclingPeaks, allowing you to migrate to WKO+ and join the ranks of those who are truly “gone.” Personally, I’ve already bought an older version of Virtual PC on the cheap that runs OK on my old TiBook, and I still have 7 days left on my WKO+ trial period, so at this very moment I’m teetering on the edge of the abyss. . .