Oh one more thing. Stages gives the ability to define power zones to taste. I think one can do up to 20 zones. This is great, but unfortunately it lacks the ability to name those zones. I’d like to have a head unit that shows Coggan iLevels but unless you can name the zones and have this show up on your head unit it’s not so practical.
I’m still on my Edge 500. The Bryton Rider 420 looks interesting to me.
FWIW I ended up buying a Garmin 530 a month ago and am really happy with it - although I’ve never had an issue with my 520 in almost 4 years of use. Had seriously looked at Wahoo Roam and the Stages L50 and the Garmin 530, figured I could always return the 530 if it didn’t work out. Played with a friends Roam and thought it was overpriced, and I’m using features on Garmin that aren’t on other devices. My 520 had iLevels and I’ve looked at creating my own vo2 intervals using them, but didn’t really see the value having iLevels on headunit.
When else would one benefit from iLevels, if not on the head unit? Because they change so often, memorizing them is a bit silly. Being able to set them and know what zone to hit while riding seems imperative to using them properly.
All of my outside training rides have power targets at or below ftp - where classic levels are the same as iLevels - or max effort sprints / short efforts without a power target. The more technical intervals are done indoors where I don’t use head unit to control trainer.
What software do you use for indoor training? (and how easy is it to work with iLevels?)
TrainerRoad and I find the WorkoutCreator to be easy to use.
How do you manage the fact that your ilevels/targets/durations change frequently? Seems like you’d have to constantly edit your workouts…
I used the Workout Creator on the Stages Link website, and while it wasn’t difficult, it wasn’t something that I thought was a good use of time for daily workouts and all courses. Laborious, insofar as clicking a mouse and hitting a keyboard can be laborious. The inability to import a workout file left me unimpressed.
Worse yet, when I created a workout set to present intervals for prescribed course distances, as per BBS projections, the L10 zipped through the intervals at a pace that left me completing the whole workout over only half the actual course. It took me about half of the event’s course to figure out what was happening. The laborious exercise of creating the workout had led me to nearly memorize the 9 course intervals, which did serve me well, but the combination of the course builder and L10 was, I found, useless to me for the purpose of on-course interval call-outs. I’m looking for my next device/software solution.
interesting read, surprised that you couldn’t import a workout. FWIW for simple things like doing a 4x15 sweet spot workout outside, it only takes a minute or two using the Garmin workout creator on web or mobile (lap button for warmup/cooldown, and then a repeat block for the intervals).
I’m really looking forward to the release of the Bryton Rider 420, with workouts able to be created on their app and imported to the device easily.
One can use the Stages-Link site to import a course easily in .gpx or .fit file format, which is nice, but a set of structured intervals, as a workout seems to not be an importable option. Conceivably with a future TrainerRoad / Stages integration this would happen.
On the positive side, I can report that I doubled down with Stages and bought an M50. Performing a series of structured intervals outdoors was, once the workout had been created and downloaded onto the M50, flawlessly achieved. Stages support was amicable and supportive, but the L10 just didn’t do for me what I was led to believe it would be firmware updated to do. It’s still early days for me with the M50, but I’m confident that I would have had a better experience and probably even some better results in my riding season if I’d had the M50 all along.
help, could someone tell me how the Dash l50 or m50 works compared to Garmin or Wahoo, I currently have a Srm Pc8, and I think I need a change, although it works well for me. Thank you
Checkout this DCRainmaker post: First Look: Stages New Dash L50, M50, and L10 GPS Bike Computers, Including Color Mapping | DC Rainmaker
Thank you, I had already read it, but it is not done in depth, says that soon, I seek the opinion of users without marketing policies, I do not say that Ray is reliable, but I like to read opinions of people like me and that they have updated firmware 2.0
The short summary is that I have a Garmin Edge 1030, Wahoo Bolt, and Dash L50 and the L50 is the only computer that I use. I am currently on the latest firmware release - 2.1.0- that includes support for Varia radar. I have had the L50 since August and I use it as my regular computer. I am completely happy with it. I bought it initially because of the large and bright screen that I can actually read without my glasses. There isn’t ANY bike computer with a screen nearly as good. I get over 10 hours run time on a battery charge. It is supposed to be longer than that but I have never pushed my luck. The battery gauge still had over 20% after 10 hours use. I have used most of the features on the Dash and they work fine. Navigation works well. The only limitation is that it is like the Edge 530 or Wahoo Elemnt in that you can’t type in an address into the computer and have it create a route for you. You need to download a route onto it. I use RidewithGPS and importing those routes is automatic once the link between the two is setup. There are also a ton of metrics that you can display in a completely customizable fashion on however many different screens you want. I have never that any serious bugs or lost any data. So, that is a good thing. The web app - phone app - Dash infrastructure was initially a bit complicated and finicky but that has improved dramatically in the latest releases. The only thing I haven’t used is structured workouts since I do most of those on the trainer.
If only their anywhere mount wasn’t complete not-fit-for-purpose garbage, I may have kept the Dash L10 I bought.
Never tried that mount. Only the out front mount which works fine. I have heard that some of the mounts need to be updated for the newer Dashes since they were designed for the original one. You’d have to check with Stages.
A query, you can not name the areas in the roulette? And in Stages Link is there any way to put the watts of the zones instead of% of them? I train with ilevels and every week changes watts in zones. The support that arrives in the box is the good? Greetings and waiting for the L50 to arrive
A query, you can not name the areas in the roulette? And in Stages Link is there any way to put the watts of the zones instead of% of them? I train with ilevels and every week changes watts in zones. The support that arrives in the box is the good? Greetings and waiting for the L50 to arrive
In Stages Link Web app, if you want to, you can manually set the number of zones, names of zones, and the % FTP for the top and bottom of each zone. Then you can sync these to the Dash. The coloring of the fields and the power wheel then will match your manual zones. The zone settings are under “account” on the web app. On the Dash itself you choose “Stages Link” for the zones instead of Coggan or the Stages default zones.
All that said, other than playing around with it, I haven’t used this functionality on an actual ride. So, I don’t know if there are any bugs or things like that. But the functionality is there.