The Man Who Has Single-Handedly Tested Nearly Every Self-Quantification Device On The Face Of The Planet.

Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield. Strap on your propeller hats because in today's episode we're gonna take a deep dive into self quantification technology. And the guy who has tested just about every device on the face of the planet in this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

I think it's probably the biggest challenge we have is that a lot of these devices gather data and gather metrics, but you have to really kind of step back and go, is this data useful for training or racing or is it just noise? And that's the biggest thing that I've encountered. Kind of trying to focus on a lot of these companies coming out with new metrics. Are they marketing metrics or are they something that you can truly use to get faster? I've only got so many runs or so many rides in a given week or a given day, right? Just the human body can only do so much. And so a lot of that testing time is really more collecting data than it is watching every last second on the Watch itself.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

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Foreign.

Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield and I want you to meet my friend, Ray Maker. You may have been to his website before. His website is dcrainmaker.com and on that site Ray single handedly tests, reviews and reports on just about every self quantification device on the face of the planet. Stuff from established players like Garmin and Polar and Timex, and also more fringe products from companies like Strava and Zwift and Stages Cycling and other brands that really attract the attention of both the tech world and the bike market and the triathlon industry and the biohacking industry and beyond. And a lot of times he's testing prototypes months before a product is brought to the market. Now he kind of operates beneath the radar of the traditional kind of brick and mortar ink on paper side of the sporting tech world, but his site is shockingly the sixth most popular bicycling website on the face of the planet. He's been listed by Runner's World as one of the 50 most influential people in running and he's really one of the world's go to resources when it comes to how these self quantification devices and, and fitness tracking devices really work or as the case may be, don't. So Ray is also, he's a triathlete, he's a runner, and despite operating DC Rainmaker, he still works full time in the IT industry. And even though he's from America, he actually is on the call with me now and lives in Paris, France with his wife. And he's also a global adventurer. We'll talk a little bit about that today as well. But his far flung trips are part of the appeal of his website and he reports not just on technology but also on his adventures running and biking and swimming around the globe. So really a man after my own heart in that sense. He puts the gadgets that he tests through some pretty rigorous evaluations if you check out his website, and reports on nitty gritty details and flaws and benefits and pros and cons. And I've seen him do things like mount like multiple power meters on his bike or wear several heart rate monitors at once. And he has some pretty intricate multi thousand word reports and reviews and photographs on every single device that he tests. So if you are into fitness, tech, self quantification tracking, swimming, biking, running, just about anything else, you're going to really dig today's episode. So Ray, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me on. Good chatting with you again.

Yeah, it's been a little while since we hung out way back in 2012. I don't remember this, I don't know if you remember this, but you and I went down to cover the half Ironman Texas where Lance Armstrong was racing. And this was back when Lance Armstrong was first getting into triathlon. And I remember you and I went for a run along the Gulf and I think you were even testing out some kind of a brand new fancy heart rate monitor as we were running and we got a chance to spend some time together. And back then you were racing triathlons, you were reviewing heart rate monitors and power meters and stride rate counters and beyond and then, then you up and move to France. So what's kind of changed in the past few years for you as far as where you're at and what you do?

Yeah, things have kind of just gotten bigger, I guess in terms of, you know, I think a few years ago they were definitely kind of hitting their stride, but now it's just there's a lot going on in the marketplace. A lot of companies that weren't used to be sport technology companies, you know, like the Apples and the Microsofts of the world that now are. So that's added more cool things for me to check out. And then me personally, I've moved to Paris about almost four years ago now for work. And so I did that back a number of years ago, I guess. Four years. And I've been enjoying life here in France and kind of exploring Europe, but also exploring the rest of the world and kind of seeing the whole try and running scene here in Europe just through a different lens than what you do in the US Are you also.

Racing or running still in any triathlons or marathons or anything like that?

Yeah, I've got some triathlons. I actually got one coming up this weekend here. It's kind of the beginning of the season. So they've got a bit of an indoor kind of split indoor outdoor triathlon. Still a bit, bit chilly. But then, you know, coming into April, May and June certainly got some triathlon races there and I'll throw a couple more shorter distance runs and then we'll see what the, the end of the year holds. It's sort of nice. I think in the, in the US you really have to nail down your race calendar a lot earlier in the season. Right. You got to kind of like decide almost a year in advance, it feels like for a lot of the popular races. Yeah. Whereas here, especially in the triathlon scene, I can still sign up for races like I got on my browser tab open to sign up for a race in mid May. Still, it's a popular race, but doesn't like get as crazy sold out. They're not expensive. I mean, the Olympic distance race and I think it's like 45 bucks, which compared to that, I got to move to Paris.

I thought Paris was expensive. Sounds dirt cheap.

Everything else is really expensive though. So it kind of. I just got to do a lot of races to make up for it.

Yeah, the cost of French bread kind of offsets the cost of your triathlon registrations. So why do you live in Paris? Working in the IT industry, is that just a job opportunity that you wound up jumping at?

Yes, I moved over here for work, so the company at the time relocated me to France. I basically was able to choose anywhere I wanted to as long as it was near a big airport. So we kind of narrowed down a couple spots. And so my work travel at the time was basically every single week I was going somewhere. But I actually finally broke free of that this past fall. So I'm now doing the blog full time. Oh really? But yeah, it's, it's a bit of a shift, but yeah, it's been, been a fun journey. I loved my day job in the IT world. I, it was awesome. I mean there was very few people that get a fly to like New Zealand one week and you know, Brazil the next and, and that be like totally normal. But I just couldn't do both at one time. Like the blog was a full time job and then I had a full time job as IT person and so it was nice to find some balance there.

Well, like I mentioned, I've seen you do things like put a whole bunch of power meters on a bike. I've seen you wear multiple heart rate monitors at once. And you write some pretty entertaining articles on your site about all this stuff. But give people an idea in terms.

Of what you do.

What's the craziest rigor that you've ever put some device that you got or a series of devices through? What's the craziest thing you've ever done with one of these devices that you, you test?

I think I probably would go between some of the waterproofing tests I've done. So in terms of like the Apple Watch is a good example. The Apple Watch isn't, isn't claimed, doesn't claim to be waterproof. But I still went ahead and I have a waterproofing chamber that I can go ahead and put it in. So I put that into 40 meters deep, had it taken off of a high dive platform at 10 meters high, you know, when swimming with it for, for quite a ways. And so that sort of thing of just going beyond the specs to see like where that breaking point is in that case. That device survived all those tests, really?

And then they don't advertise it as a waterproof watch, right?

No, not at all. In fact, a couple of developers had submitted a swimming app for it and Apple rejected the swimming app because they were afraid people would use it for that purpose, unintended purpose. So that's like on the waterproofing side, but even just for power meters, like you mentioned, multiple power meters. So on my bikes, most of the time I'm running four to five power meters when I'm comparing new products. Because if you run two power meters, the new product plus an old product, you don't actually know which product is right, you just know that one of them is off. But you can't definitively say this one's good or bad because sometimes old products have trusted brands can have a bad day in a power meter world. So by doing two, three, four additional products, I can kind of make a picture and say, well, it's more than likely that this new product is good or it's, it's got issues in certain areas.

What's a waterproofing test chamber? How do you waterproof test a device like this?

So it's a pressurized chamber. It's actually from a company out of Vancouver that does scuba gear. And so what they've done is they created a test chamber that allowed them to validate some of their scuba camera equipment afterwards. So it kind of looks like a small aquarium basically. And then the aquarium allows you to go ahead and put a device in there. And I have an automated computer program that will go ahead and specify different levels of depth. So I can say it's 5 meters or 20 meters or 50 meters deep, then I can tell at a time. So I usually do this kind of repeat test over and over again where it'll go and you know, bring that Device down to 50 meters and then bring it back up to the surface and repeat it a number of times.

That's pretty cool. So it's a chamber, so you don't actually have to take it down that low. You can just simulate it in the chamber.

Yep, it's, it's got water and all that jazz in there. It's just that I don't have to go in there. There's actually a, a dive place, I believe it's, I'm trying to think of how deep it is. 30 or 40 meters deep up in Brussels, only about an hour and a half away on the train. That actually is a legitimate dive, like an indoor pool, but it's super deep, designed for purely just diving and stuff. And I thought about bringing stuff up there, but this is, this is way more convenient.

Interesting. So how deep can an Apple watch go?

I brought it down to 40 meters repeatedly without any problems. I haven't brought it down to see how like what the breaking point is just because I, I only have a few of them that I bought and so I wanna, I'm willing to go so far but eventually you're like, eh, I'm not gonna break it just for the sake of breaking it.

So. So Apple doesn't send you watches to test, you just had to go out and buy them and test them?

Yeah, so different companies send me things to try out, but I always send them back afterwards. So in this case with the Apple watch, I bought the units myself and so that's just, you know, some things I buy myself, some things companies send me to test for a while, but then once I'm done with them, kind of my. My thing is I send them back to the companies. So I don't.

But you don't keep them. But you don't have to do that. They don't require that you send them back.

No, virtually. Virtually none would. But I think it's just.

You could just ebay them.

I hadn't thought about that, but yeah. Yeah. I think for me, like, it's one of those things where I want to. I want to show that I'm, you know, I'm not taking this device from a company and saying it's awesome because it's free for me. Right. So this way I can kind of show that, you know, I'm. I don't have a dog in that fight. From the standpoint of whether or not you like the device, there's ways you can support the sites.

That's admirable. How do you. I mean, obviously you're not working in IT anymore. So how do you actually make money reviewing devices if you're sending them back?

Yep. So basically there's three kind of ways. There's. One is generate some revenue from ads, but it's actually a fairly small amount because in addition to sending devices back, I block all the companies that review from advertising on my site. So, like a Garmin, for example, I can't advertise on my site. So there's a little bit from ads. Most of it's from what's called affiliate sale. So if you like a product, you can go on Amazon and buy the product, or you can go on to a company called Clever Training and buy the product there as well. I don't actually particularly care what you buy from any of those places.

What'd you call Clever training?

Yep, Clever training. So. And then readers get a 10% discount as well. So that's definitely incentive for folks if they want to buy through them.

And then you get kickback from that. And that helps you to pay for the.

Yep. But I don't do, like, affiliates directly with the companies themselves. I wouldn't do affiliate with Garmin, for example.

Right.

Because I don't. I want to be able to make it so that if you. You can choose whatever product you want and the. The commission's basically the same to me. So if you want to go and buy a giant pile of toilet paper, I'm totally cool with that because it's the same commission. So it doesn't really, doesn't really matter to me what you buy. As long as you support the site, then I'm happy.

So somebody could for example, read about like let's say a, a Timex run trainer on your site. They'd click and they'd go to Amazon. And then even if they don't buy a Timex trainer, but they wind up buying like you say, toilet paper, you'd still make a little bit of money.

Yep, exactly. So that's, you know, a lot of loyal readers will go ahead and they'll just simply, there's a big Amazon logo on the right hand side. Anytime they go to make a purchase, they'll just click the Amazon logo. It goes off to Amazon and then from there it doesn't cost them anything. It doesn't is literally just one single click and they'll commission back whatever.

The wonders of the Internet, we now have thousands of listeners who can quit their jobs. Amazing. Okay, so we know the craziest rigor you've ever put a device through is this waterproofing potential of an Apple watch. But what about the coolest piece of self quantification technology you've had the opportunity to use? I mean, obviously you get some prototypes long before they get released to the general public. So maybe you've got something on hand right now that we haven't seen, or maybe there's something in the past that you've tried that never got released. But what would you say was the most intriguing thing you've ever had a chance to test?

I think it's a combination of two things. One, I think just sort of the action cameras in general like a GoPro. And I think we all take that for granted, right? The ability for us to just have a little camera with us now. But I think we've forgotten how easy and cool it is to take video of you doing cool stuff. Right. And that's something that, yeah, it's neat to know my heart rate and all that jazz when I'm running down the, the street. But I think it's cool to be able to share what I'm doing with my friends, my family and to do it no matter where I am, whether it's underwater or jumping out of an airplane or anything, I can do that. And so to me that's pretty cool. I think that next iteration is the ability for you to do that with drones involved as well. Right. So you can go ahead and you're going to have an action camera that follows you automatically. And so I've been Testing some stuff from a company called Airdog. That's pretty cool. GoPro's got one coming out. What's it called?

Airdog.

Airdog. Airdog, yep.

So, Airdog, what do they do?

So it's a drone that will follow you as you do sports action. So you can go ahead and you can be skiing or cycling or running, and this thing will just simply follow along and you can do different maneuvers that'll basically kind of make cinematic shots, if you will, and you can stitch these together and make a video afterwards. So it's like having your own personal videographer, except that it's in the air. So I did like a really cool video skiing in the Alps last month and had this thing following down just with beautiful pristine powder. And here is this just up there at different heights and whatnot. Really cool. And that technology is still emerging. There's lots of both technical as well as regulatory hurdles to some of that, but it's getting there and it's going to be super cool.

How does it know? How does the Airdog drone know to follow you and not somebody else?

So I have in my case, a small little transponder basically that I put on my jacket, so it's about the size of a deck of cards, and it goes ahead and it follows that. So that basically sends my position to the drone in the air and it sends basically my altitude as well. And so it can track my altitude going up, down. So as I descend, it follows me. If I go up, it follows me. Very, very cool. There's some companies like dji, which is a huge player in the larger consumer drone market, that has follow me technology that will follow you as a person. So it literally sees you as an image and tries to follow you. Based on what we've seen so far, that's not quite super mature.

How would it know it's you? Is it looking at like your retinal scan or something like that, or.

No, it's trying to track you as just a human looking object.

Wow.

But based on what we've seen so far in the tests, I'm waiting for mine to come later this week. But what I've seen thus far is that it's still pretty rough. It kind of easily loses track of things, but that's definitely the future. I mean, you got to start somewhere. And so in this case, they're starting there. And then obstacle avoidance is that next piece of, you know, in the case of the Airdog, it'll happily crash into a tree if that tree is there. So you need to be aware of that and in my case hyper aware that you're not going to run into a tree or a cliff or anything else, it will avoid the ground. So it'll detect the ground and keep it from hitting it in most cases.

Still though, there are some helicopter parents out there right now who are drooling, thinking about putting that little tracker in their kid's backpack and having a drone follow them to school.

I imagine that amazing.

So in terms of the technology that you've actually had a chance to review on your site and by the way, if you're listening in as Ray and I talk, I'll link to his site and I'll link to a lot of these little things that we talk about. If you just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Rainmaker that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com rainmaker just like it sounds. You'll be able to access the show notes. But Ray, I'm curious what your most highly recommended piece of technology is because I imagine you get a lot of inquiries from your website from fitness enthusiasts or triathletes. What do you find yourself recommending quite frequently?

I think it depends a little bit on what people want. If you're coming for a cycling unit, I'd recommend one thing versus a running watch. Something else or an action camera something else. I cover so many topic areas that it's, it's sort of all over the place. I think probably the most popular would be something like the Garmin Forerunner 230 or 235 if you wanted optical heart rate in it. And those are basically running watches that can do a bit more than running now. So they track your heart bars a day in the case of the Forerunner 235. But activity tracker smartwatch, that's sort of that like $250 middle of the road running watch. That GPS watch that is really appealing to a lot of folks and just a, a well made product.

What is it about Garmin that would make it superior to other GPS units? Do they have some kind of proprietary technology?

I think it's their entire ecosystem. I think that's something that you know, we've had. There's lots of competitors out there, whether it be Polar, Asunto or Timex. To a degree, I think it's Garmin has the most clean and easy to use ecosystem. In a lot of cases they have the most features. So you know, Polar has a decent website. It's not as detailed as Garmin's. Polar makes some, some good Products, especially in that mid range, not as much in the high end, but in the mid range are pretty solid. And Suunto makes some great high end products, for example. But I think Garmin tends to be able to find that middle of the road as well as the high end depending on the products they have and does a really good job at having lots of features. I think if you look back at any product development cycle, it's the companies that have been there for 10 years plus that have that history or knowledge of all those little features. You think about all the little things that you want and watch. And if a new company comes into that marketplace, they have to start from zero. Right. And so they've got the basics working and then they have to figure out all those Edge cases that consumers have yelled at them about for years and years and years. And so I think that just takes time.

Interesting. So do you have like specific watches that are just like your go to watches that you wear or are you just constantly wearing something new and different depending on what you happen to be testing?

A little bit of both, I think. On the cycling side I have my go to units like I have the Garmin Edge 520 on the cycling side that I'm pretty much going to always be using for things and I'll complement that with whatever I'm testing that day. So right now, for example, in cycling I'm testing the new Wahoo Elemnt GPS computer. In the case of running, I tend to go back and forth between the Garmin Forerunner 630 and then also depending on what I'm doing, if I'm doing like ultra running, not without the ultra, so I guess mountain running and things like that, then I might use an Ambit 3 peak in there. A Suunto Ambit 3 peak?

Yeah, I actually just got one of those. Somebody sent me one and I've been experimenting with it. And up till this point, well, just so folks know, for several years I raced for Timex up until this year and so I was pretty much just like strictly required to wear Timex. And if I was ever seen in a photograph wearing anything other than a Timex, I would be in the doghouse. But now I'm kind of branching out and testing all these things. I have one of these suuntos now. It's pretty interesting. It's got an altimeter on it so you can. I went and raced an adventure race recently and was using the altimeter to do some of my, my data point finding. It's. And there's there's some cool features.

Yeah, it's a great watch and especially good for that mountaineering, hiking, you know, mountain sort of scenario. I think that's where they, they've excelled at and they're, they're really good at that. So if I'm going to be doing testing in the woods, I'm likely going to go ahead and take that watch along with me to compare against because I think it's one of the, the better units has certainly a competitor to that, the Phoenix 3, which is also very, very good. But I like to try to mix up watch as much as possible and take when I'm doing a test with a running watch, for example, I usually have between two and four units with me to go ahead and to be able to kind of provide a comparison and say, here's how different units act in these different scenarios.

How much difference is there? Like when you put on a watch and let's say, let's just use a really simple scenario like calorie burning. You know, if you're testing multiple watches at once while you're out on a run or a walk or a hike. Is there a pretty significant difference between brands as far as like how many calories it would tell you that you burnt over say an hour?

Yeah, it could be huge. So especially the calories is a great example because they, it's funny. So every company uses different kind of calorie metrics behind the scenes and sometimes most times those are provided by third party companies. In a lot of cases those third party companies are all in Finland. There is like a one square mile area in Finland where almost all of this heart rate science type calorie information comes from. It's kind of funny like these small little startup companies basically just kind of trade employees back and forth over the years. So you see a lot of that same kind of thought going between the different companies. But ultimately like any company you have, engineers and engineers decide that their algorithm or their way is better than another way. And sometimes they're right and sometimes they're wrong. So you see those variances, especially when it comes to devices like Garmin for example, will use literally a cheaper algorithm in their lower end devices compared to a more expensive algorithm they outsource in their higher end devices. So as a result, in the lower end devices most of the time the calorie burn is pretty good. It's about the same as what you get the higher end devices. But as you get into certain edge cases where someone for whatever reason physiologically is different, that's where you start to see those differences become apparent, where someone will go, well, why am I burning three times as many calories as on this other device? Right there.

Gotcha. So does it really come down to the fact that the more that you pay for the nicer elements of technology, the more accurate you're going to get in terms of calorie burn or heart rate or distance or pace or something like that?

For calorie burn, yes. For heart rate, for the most part, it's fairly straightforward. In terms of chest strap, most companies are doing it the same way. In fact, most chest straps are made in the same factory. They're just rebranded by different companies. The difference is when you get to optical heart rate sensors, that's where you start to see some major differences. And it's not even by brand, it's really by the models and the sensors we use beneath them. So in the case of Apple, for example, Apple has optical heart rate sensor technology. You would probably say coming into it that Apple's is going to be great, because Apple. Right.

What is optical heart rate sensor technology?

Sure. So optical heart rate sensor is, you may have seen watches with a little green LED light on the inside of them that allows you to measure your heart rate optically without any chest strap. So in the past you had to put a chest strap on that could be uncomfortable for some people, especially for women. So an optical heart rate sensor is basically one that usually goes in your wrist, but they can go other places in your body, like on your upper arm or something like that. And it just reads the blood flow through your capillaries and can measure your heart rate there.

And those are accurate.

Now they can be accurate. And that's the trick, is that some of the devices are very, very accurate. And there's a couple companies that have been doing this for a number of years now, and they're smaller companies. So one of them is Valencel and they make products for a number of different companies, but Scosche being another one. Mio. Mio Sensors makes another one. And these companies tend to license sensors to other companies like Garmin and Adidas and so on to use in their products. So you kind of have to play this matrix of figuring out which underlying sensor is being used in which product. So, for example, Apple developed their sensor in house and by and large, it's not terribly awesome. Garmin has some products that use Mio sensors and they're very accurate and other products that use their own in house sensors and those aren't as accurate.

Yeah, I'VE heard of this Mio before. So you would say that the like, the Mio is an example of like if a woman's listening in and she didn't want to wear a heart rate monitor strap, that, that actually has a pretty decent optical sensor in it.

Very solid optical sensor. It's one of the, one of the best ones out there.

Okay, cool. So in terms of all this technology, right, it seems like, you know, obviously the Consumer Electronics show had an entire floor devoted to just these, these tracking and self quantification devices. And there's new stuff all the time. How much of it is driven by companies just being under the gun to bring some kind of new technology or some fancy new thing they can sell to the market versus how much of it is just like truly groundbreaking technology? I mean, are your eyeballs popping out your head every year when all this new stuff comes out or is a lot of it kind of like, ho hum, just the same old?

A little bit of both, I think. Like Garmin, last year they released 21 new fitness devices, right? That's basically a new fitness device every, what, two and a half, three weeks or something. So that's a lot of devices. And some of them were like you said, ho hum, shrug, whatever, just minor ads to keep people interested. And even like in the case of, they released a heart rate sensor watch in June, only to have that watch be eclipsed by a new version in late September, the first week of October. So that obviously ticks off customers who are now sitting there going, I just bought this watch three months ago and it's already basically dead in arrival. So I think there is this fight and I think Apple and the involvement now of the Apple, Microsoft and Google, the world into this realm has caused a lot of these purely fitness players to kind of both up their game, which is good for consumers, but also just sort of like throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Gotcha. Okay, so when you get a new device, are you doing anything specifically to try and figure out whether it really is like a new technology or is it pretty much you trusting what the manual says as far as what it has in there, if it really is something new or grounded?

I pretty much never read the manual, so I'm looking at basically understanding how the device works, whether or not that sensor works. I treat every device as brand new. So even though a company may have great, like GPS is a good example of this. Even though a company may have great history in GPS devices, every single new watch that comes out from a GPS standpoint is different, and it can perform great or it can be horrible. And there's a lot of factors to that. It could be the GPS chipset, firmware. So what firmware is loaded on that chip? It could be the exact GPS chipset, It could be the antenna design, it could be the software on the unit itself. And it is like, it's not unheard of or uncommon for a unit to be great and then the next version to be horrible. And it happens every year. So it's one of those things you kind of have to start from the beginning and figure out, is this unit worthwhile or is there some issue in it?

So you don't read the manual for these devices?

Almost never.

How do you know how to use them?

I basically just try every button there is. So I'm trying all the options. I'm understanding how they work.

Doesn't seem very efficient.

It's not. But it allows me to get through things, I think. The thing is, I understand a lot of other devices already, so I kind of have this mental database of what those features are and what's changed and what's different in those features. And I also spend a lot of time talking to the companies on what's in those devices. So take for example, interval in interval functions in a GPS watch. In the case of Garmin's interval function, that line of code has largely remained the same year after year after year. So I'm going to spend less time on that and basically I'm going to focus on the new stuff and kind of validate that the old stuff works, but otherwise keep on the new stuff and see what's going on there.

Interesting. Okay, got it. So when it comes to the products that you receive and you review, there's pretty much no bias. Right? Because you're getting those, you're not buying them, but you're getting them and you're just sending them back.

Yep. So I send them back, and it's pretty much as simple as that. I think for me, I'm going to call out companies that suck, and I'm also going to praise companies that do well. So if something's bad, that review is going to reflect that, and the level of bad of that product will kind of drive how much criticism I have for them. And, you know, obviously if a company is releasing a lot of products, then more than likely they're going to get products right more than most of the time. So you're going to have more positive reviews. But every once in a while, even the companies out there that are dominating the landscape in this market, still release bad products and still make bad decisions. And so I'm going to call them on it.

So when you're exercising, do you ever just get sick of all this? Like, do you ever just unplug, take everything off, no heart rate monitor, no power meter, and just go out and race by feel or train by feel?

Every once in a while I do. Sometimes the closest I'll do to that will be I'll go ahead and I'll wear the watches, but I'll make them out of sight, for example, so I won't look at them, I won't use them, I'll just simply have them recording data. And the reason is for me, I've only got so many runs or so many rides in a given week or a given day. Right. Just the human body can only do so much. And so I'm trying to take advantage of that testing time as much as possible. But a lot of that testing time is really more collecting data than it is watching every last second on the watch itself. So there are certainly runs where I'm very much using the watch itself. For example, if I was doing interval pacing. But if I'm going for a long run and I just want to collect data on GPS accuracy, for example, I may stick some watches on me that are just simply collecting data along the way and that's it. But I can otherwise just run my own run my own run.

Once you get your data, and you bet you've been out training with this data, do you have some kind of software that you upload it to? Like, do you have one piece of software that you like to use for tracking your own training or your own racing?

For my own training, most everything goes into both Strava and TrainingPeaks. So I use TrainingPeaks as sort of my like official golden logbook of my training record. Uh, so, you know, obviously if I'm going out for a ride, like my ride yesterday had, I think five different bike head units on there. Um, so that's a lot of data. And so I want to ensure when it gets to training peaks, it's not going to have five copies of my ride there. So I try to keep that clean. Um, and I use Strava primarily for just sharing my rides with the world at large. So I kind of look at that as like my, my Facebook of, of training. Yeah, but yeah, those are kind of the two that I use. And then behind the scenes I use other tools for actual analysis and comparing different units in terms of how they perform, accuracy and things like that.

Gotcha. Yeah, that keeps things clean. That's generally what I use is training peaks along with of course a few Instagram photos here and there. Now as far as your own self quantification, do you ever try some kind of new supplement or new nutrition strategy or some kind of a curveball thrown at your body and then go out and self quantify and see how it affects exercise? With all this data that you're tracking, are you doing more than just testing the device? Are you looking at how certain supplements or things like that affect your body?

I don't look too much at things like supplements or the like, but I look a little bit how sleep tracking is becoming more and more popular. There's a lot of capabilities there, so I'm looking at more environmental things. So for example, if I'm taking a red eye flight back, what is the impact on my training throughout the week and how does that impact things like resting heart rate? And so how does that impact my sleep patterns for the week? And so that to me is more interesting. I've done some stuff here and there playing around with do you feel like just drinking, like drinking a bunch of wine and how does that impact heart rate and things like that?

So what do you use to track sleep?

I've been trying a couple different units. One is the Withings Aura system. So basically it's like a bedside clock looking thing, a lamp clock combo dish. And then it goes ahead and has sensors that go underneath the side of the bed. So if there's two people in a bed then you can have two sensors and it tracks everything from your heart rate all night long to different levels of sleep. Also been trying out lately a product called MFIT E M M F I T. I've heard of that one. Yep. They do something kind of similar, but they also do heart rate variability. So they're digging a bit deeper into that heart rate metrics and starting to track that a bit more. There's obviously a lot of companies out there that are doing sleep tracking. I think it's interesting once you get deeper into that in terms of the data that you're being or that you're gathering versus just are you moving or not?

So what kind of stuff does this Withings Aura track?

So it tracks heart rate, it tracks sleep states, it'll track the trending of that. For me, the heart rate is interesting because resting heart rate gets into recovery. So typically the lower your resting heart rate, the more recovered you are. I found that for me My resting heart rate is between 39 and 42 typically. But if I etch closer to, say, 50 or 51 beats per minute as my resting heart rate, then I know I'm about to get sick or I'm just incredibly fatigued. So it's really, really predictable for me. And I know that if I get that close, then it's probably time for me to find a way to rest a bit more, otherwise training's gonna go down and all that.

So you look at that more than you look at like heart rate variability to predict, like, injury or illness.

I do, I think, and that may be a bit old school and that's something I've been digging into more. And part of the challenge with heart rate variability, as I dig more and more into it, is different companies do it different ways. So you sit there and go, well, if I'm using heart rate variability, but manufacturer A does it one way and manufacturer B does a different way and manufacturer C does it a different way, then how do I know which one's right?

Yeah, that's your conundrum is you've got so many devices you're testing. I mean, I use heart rate variability to predict injury or illness or even to purposefully overreach or slightly over train and then bounce back from that. But I just always use the same device simply because I'm not getting hundreds of devices in the mail like you. I don't think so. This withings aura allows you to track your sleep and your heart rate. Are you looking at, like, when you wake up, do you look at things like sleep latency or the number of sleep cycles that you go through or anything like that?

I don't typically. Mostly because I know my sleep is usually pretty bad to begin with, so I'm just looking at my total hours. So I keep it above a certain amount and I'm looking at my resting heart rate. And for me personally, I've kind of figured out those patterns. I think that's one of the both the neat and challenging thing with resting heart rate or sleep in general, is that you really need a lot of data to start figuring it out. Like, you can't just use one of these devices for one week and say, I figured it out, I'm good. You really need to have it for many weeks and realistically months to kind of be able to develop those trends and go, ah, so this is what this looks like when I had a really good training week. And let me go back and validate that data against sleep data or against resting Heart rate or even heart rate variability data. And that's just. It takes time, unfortunately.

Gotcha. So you also mentioned alcohol, that you tested alcohol and the effects of alcohol on exercise. Yeah.

So I was kind of curious. I did this a while back where, you know, when I was drinking more like not to the point of drunk, but if you just drank a lot one day, which is pretty easy to do in France with wine so plentiful and cheap, what is the impact of that on heart rate, for example, and what is the impact on that on training the next day? And how does both pace and all that feel? And the challenge with that, of course, is that's very personal to me. Right. So how I react to that to be very different than you or very different than someone that drinks a lot more or a lot less. So it's one of those things where it's not translatable to everyone, but it's kind of an example of where you can use technology to start to figure out does that matter? And so how that would matter to a runner though is all people who do endurance running are going, I got my Saturday morning long run. How much can I drink Friday night? And so this is the way you could probably start to quantify that and say, okay, I can have X number of drinks because Saturday morning, you know, it is or isn't going to impact me beyond a certain threshold.

Got it. Okay, cool. So how many drinks did you drink when you tested this?

I think last time I did it, it was roughly equivalent a bottle of wine just by myself within a few hour period. So enough that you know, if you got a. Depending on the bottle of wine, you have higher alcohol content bottle of wine, then that can. For me that's a fair bit. I don't drink a ton, so it just depends again on how much you're drinking normally.

Yeah. Okay. I actually just found this on your website. You had 12% loss in bike power. It looks like your heart rate went up by almost two heart rate zones compared to what it would normally be for a given level of exertion.

Wow.

So it had a pretty significant effect. Wow. And by the way, if you're listening in, I'll link to some of this stuff in the show notes if you want to follow some of the crazy stuff that Ray has done to his body while testing these self quantification devices. Ray. So speaking of drinking and damaging the body or excessive airline travel or lack of sleep damaging the body, we've had discussions on the podcast before about Bluetooth and wi fi and Being constantly bombarded by radiation basically from some of these devices. Have you ever looked into the health of that or have you ever been concerned by any of those variables when it comes to just like constantly being tied down to an electronic device?

It's not something I've looked into. I'm not sure how I would test that, to be honest. I think it's something that I know there's obviously a lot of entities out there that are testing it and are looking at it. And I don't think there's anything that we've seen at this point that indicates concern there. Assuming you're somewhat normal and high on where you put these devices. But honestly, I think the bigger concern there is more on the mental health side of things than it is probably on the radiation side. Right. So just the. If you're bombarded by Smart smartphone notifications 24 hours a day and you're in this conic or this constant state of hyper awareness, is that more damaging to your mental health than just being able to relax and kind of shut some things off?

Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah, we had an interesting podcast with a guy named Dr. Jack Cruz and he was talking about how long term exposure to Bluetooth signals and this was mostly near the head. Right. It caused leakage of the blood brain barrier in rodents. And then he has more concerns about devices that emit a WiFi signal. I believe the Apple Watch does that versus devices that emit a lower frequency, say like a Bluetooth signal. But it is interesting. It's something that I'm constantly aware of. I try personally not to be tied down especially to the WI fi too much. So you also, like I mentioned, you're an experienced world traveler and you have a pretty cool travel blog in which you write about all these different places that you've been around the world either visiting or racing. What are some of your favorite hotspots that you think folks listening in should see if they're an athlete, like a travel destination race you'd recommend or just like an active vacation that you've been on that you just think everybody should know about?

I think for, I think probably one of the coolest places to be an active or an athlete and still be on vacation, still see something totally different, is around Cape Town, South Africa. So that's absolutely beautiful coastline along the Cape there and a huge cycling community, lots of running going on there and you can really get out and just enjoy this very rugged coastline with kind of these cliffs that just jet up, you know, I'm guessing a thousand Feet into the air and then beautiful beaches there for the right time of year. And so in Cape Town as a city is a cool, vibrant place as well. So I love getting down there. And it's the opposite, you know, in terms of seasons. So this time of year it's. It's really nice right there versus in the. In the summer, be kind of a little bit cooler. So to me, that's a. That's a great place. There are some races down there. I haven't done any of those, but definitely I've done a bit of cycling down there and running. And the cycling is just awesome. I mean, where else can you get like an ostrich running down the road in front of you or after you or wherever else? And then, of course, you can combine that with just kind of being out in nature in general, with safaris and things like that. Just a short little plane hop away from Cape Town. So it's one of those places that I love going out and kind of being active in.

What about races? Have you been to a destination race, for example? I tell people, any triathletes out there, I tell them you gotta go and race someday. The Laguna Phuket Triathlon. And now they have the Half Ironman there, so you can stay for two weeks. And it's just good food and good parties and it's a very well organized race and a safe place, but also a place where you see a lot of stuff you don't see in other places of the world. You know, everything from, like, you know, Thai kickboxing to amazing Thai cuisine, you know, to $5 killer massages. So what about you? Do you have like a. Like a racing hotspot that you've been to as far as a race that you've really enjoyed?

I'm probably a bit biased. And I love the. The Paris marathon. So it's a lot of fun here in the city. That doesn't count.

You live there.

It doesn't count. No, but it's, it's, it is a good destination race in that it's one of those ones where you can go to get around easily. And you see, like, you legitimately see the entire city and every single monument along this race course. So it's a lot of fun in that respect. I think most of the racing I've done in Europe has been either marathons or kind of small racing. So I haven't done a lot beyond that. And then most of my travel, I've traveled. I don't know, I think like 70 to 80 countries now, but it hasn't been as much for a destination endurance race. I've done a lot of 10ks in places. Usually if I go somewhere and I can find on their local schedule a 10k race in a. In a city, I'll do that. Um, I think that's. That's an easy one that a lot of people forget about is that, you know, Most cities have 10ks, like almost every weekend somewhere. So you can usually, if you poke around a little bit ahead of time, find a race in that city and then the. The benefit there is you get a T shirt or whatnot to take home with you.

Gotcha. Okay, cool. So in terms of athlete quantification, you probably get this question all the time. I'm going to ask anyways, but what do you think is the next biggest trend in athlete quantification? Because we see heart rate variability, we see sleep cycle tracking, we see, like. I actually just recently got this power meter device for running called a stride that I've been testing on my treadmill. There's all sorts of new stuff all the time. What do you think is the most exciting or the coolest trend that's coming down the pipeline?

I think it's some of those that you named. I think in terms of running, I think running power is definitely something that's coming down that pipeline. I've been trying the stride out as well, and it's a technology that's still emerging. There's still some open questions there, but to dismiss it would be silly. I think if you fast forward five or ten years from now, running power will be just as popular as cycling power.

Now, by the way, why would people want to go with power for running?

It allows you to basically kind of normalize, I guess you could say variables like wind and terrain in your running paces. So that's just like in cycling. So in cycling, people use power to go ahead and figure out if you're going up a hill or down a hill or into the wind or with the wind, that you can normalize all those variables and keep a very consistent effort across all those. And so cycling, running does the same here. So instead of having pace, because if you run up a hill, your pace is going to decrease for the same amount of effort or your effort increases for the same pace. So the idea with power is that it's more instantaneous than heart rate. Heart rate is a very lagging indicator, meaning it takes a bit more time for heart rate to catch up. And heart rate also can be variable depending on your health. That day. Right. Whether you got enough sleep or if you're fatigued or if you're sick. Heart rate can be quite dramatic in terms of difference there. So whereas power is, it's not something that's measuring your body, it's measuring, you know, your output. So that's the benefit. I think there's still definitely that technology is kind of, it's getting there. There's some questions like for example, stride doesn't take into account wind. Right. So if you're running a marathon into a 20 mile an hour headwind, that'll make a pretty big deal by the end of the race. So that's, that's an area that still needs to catch up a bit.

Gotcha. Okay, cool. So we've got power meter for running. Anything else that you think is going to be big this year or, or in the next couple of years for self quantification for athletes?

I think we'll continue to see better data around the 24, 7 heart rate pieces. So we're starting to see that now where we have this 24,7 heart rate being tracked through primarily optical heart rate sensors that are in wristwatches. But the data, they're not quite pulling the data out of that yet that they could to be able to go ahead and develop trends. So I think we'll start to see more companies taking advantage of that data and getting into things like heart rate variability deeper. But I think we're just kind of scratching the surface of what's potential.

And you mean just because you can track it all the time, like all day long?

Exactly.

Without wearing a heart rate strap per se?

Precisely. So to the normal person, you don't feel or look any different. You just have this tiny little green light that's kind of always on. And so that's something that I think as we gather more data, we'll be able to start to figure out what to do with that data and then how to train erase by it. Which I think is probably the biggest challenge we have is that a lot of these devices gather data and gather metrics, but you have to really kind of stand back and go or step back and go. Is this data useful for training, Erasing. Right. Or is it just noise? And that's the biggest thing that I've been kind of trying to focus on. A lot of these companies coming out with new metrics, are they marketing metrics or are they something that you can truly use to get faster for your race?

Gotcha. Well, Ray, you've done everything from testing a Garmin GPS While running around in circles on a cruise ship. You've got articles on how to take great photos while you're out training. You obviously have your article about the effects of a bottle of wine. You have your 25 most useful posts. You've got a podcast. There's all sorts of goodies. I could spend hours on your website. And folks, if you're listening in, you should add this one to your feed reader. I'll warn you, you might get sucked into the Internets for a while on Ray's site, but it's dcrainmaker.com dc. Why is it called DC by the way?

So you know how, like when you chose your AOL screen name years and years and years ago, you just had to like type something in until you got it.

My choose for tennis.

Exactly. But like, I tried Rainmaker just as a play in my name. It didn't work when I was living in D.C. at the time. So I stuck D.C. in front of it and then the little blog spot thing came back and said successful, and that was it. Had I known I live in Paris or someone else, I probably would have thought that through a bit more. But I suppose when you're just starting off with exactly one viewer, you. You don't really think through those things.

Yeah, well, it sounds cool. And now it's like a household name in cycling. So there you go. So dcrainmaker.com check it out and I'm sure you'll enjoy some of Ray's stuff if you're into self quantification or triathlon or anything else. So, Ray, thanks so much for coming on the show. Oh, and folks, if you're listening in, I've been taking notes seriously and some of the articles and some of the things that Ray and I have talked about you can also Access over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Rainmaker so Ray, thanks for your time, man.

Awesome.

All right, folks, this is Ben Greenfield and Raymaker signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.

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