Interview with Jamie Williamson, co-founder of Stryd
After my initial presentation about Stryd, the first running power meter (in spanish), I would like to hand you the interview I made with Jamie Williamson, Stryd co-founder and lead engineer of Stryd since more than 5 years ago. As you can see, this is not a couple days project, but it has a lot of research behind it. And, only now, once it’s on the final stage, it has become notorious and it’s available through a Kickstarter campaign (and I’m proud to be one of their initial backers).
Jamie also provide me with a FIT file to help understand what’s behind Stryd and how can we use it on our training. But before showing you those details, here is the interview with Jamie
Interview with Jamie Williamson, co-founder and lead engineer of Stryd
Eduardo Mateos- Stryd works thanks to internal accelerometers and a barometer. We have already seen this in many other devices. Where is the magic of Stryd?
Jamie Williamson- Stryd uses motion and environmental sensors to track your core body in high-resolution through the unique 3D environment you are running through. Stryd’s magic comes from its power algorithms, which fuses the physics behind your motion and environment to arrive at running power.
JW- We have a plan to properly account for the impact of changes in wind speed but we don’t have solid testing results on this now. We’ll follow up on our blog (http://blog.stryd.com), when we have more news on this.
Data analytics
Enough words. Is with graphics where you’ll better learn what Stryd can do to improve your training and how it works. I’ve had access to an activity FIT file where we can see the correlation between pace, power and height. This is the full graphic file (by the way, uploaded to Garmin Connect and it recognized power right away) that you can check to get your own opinions.
But let’s dive into details. In this part of the training (right at the end), you can see that, running in a pancake flat surface and with constant pace, the power remains almost constant. That is perfectly normal, as not every stride will be equal. But in the moment there is a bump in the pace, the power also peaks as you need more power to get more speed. If you were to look at a HR graph, you would not see those clear peaks, as HR needs more time to account for pace changes. This is extremely helpful when doing short intervals.
Efficiency. Less power, same pace
That’s what Stryd can teach you. Unlike biking, where you try to reach high power, what we try to look at while running is lower our power output. This way we could keep running at the same pace and be able to run longer. Check out this video where Jamie Williamson himself ask Charles Garabedian to make two slight changes in his running, while maintaining an stable speed of 7 mph.
Just by relaxing his shoulders and giving a little bit more cadence, it allows Charles to save 30 Watts while running at the same speed. The great thing about Stryd is you can check it live, right on your watch screen.
So Stryd will make it possible to improve your running efficiency, and you will be able to run at the same pace with less effort allowing you to run longer. Or, put it the other way, keep the same power output as before, but you will be running faster.