Power Output When I Stop Pedaling

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I have this issue where my power gets hung up when I stop pedaling. If I’m cruising along and then stop pedaling, my cadence reading will go to zero, but my watts will stay at the last recorded value and my avatar will cruise along as if I’m still pedaling (avatar stops pedaling, despite cruising along at 100 - 400 watts). I’ve also noticed that if I stand up on my pedals with all my weight right after I stop pedaling, the watts can shoot up to 400+, whereas if I stay seated and put less weight on the pedals, the watts hang out around 100 - 200. This only happens if I put weight on them right after I stop pedaling; it does not happen if I put weight on them while at rest or a few seconds after I quit pedaling. In fact, to keep it from happening, I have to literally lift up on my pedal when I stop pedaling to get them to read 0 watts.

It seems like an anomaly related to my set up: I have Garmin Vector 3 pedals connected via bluetooth to AppleTV. If I connect through ANT+ to my Mac computer, this does not happen (at least it never happened before). It also never happens on outdoor rides. Seems like an issue with the AppleTV getting stuck on the last power data point before going to zero (even though it recognizes that cadence goes to zero just fine)… 

I wish it didn’t happen, because anytime I try to rest, my avatar still cruises along at many many watts, so it messes up my true effort and skews my averages. Since noticing this problem myself, I’ve seen other riders out there barreling along at a steady high wattage (4.0+ w/kg) without pedaling for minutes at a time. In races no less! It’s easy to spot: if you see an avatar not pedaling, but they are putting out steady wattages (that is, the w/kg aren’t bouncing around, but remain perfectly constant), then I would guess they are taking advantage of this issue.

Anyone else have this issue? Anyone know how to keep it from happening (besides never stop pedaling)?

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Here’s an graphical example of this issue in the image below. The graph shows the power (blue) and cadence (yellow) during a short race I did a while back. You can see that during the race, I kept my cadence around 80 - 90 rpm and power around 250 - 300 watts, but during the sprint at the end, I ramped up my cadence to about 100 rpm and power to 1000 watts. Once I crossed the finish line, I stopped pedaling and put my head down for about a minute to catch my breath. You can see that my cadence (yellow) went to zero, but my power (blue) stuck at around 900 watts while I was not pedaling! Not cool, because it got me a KOM on a Strava segment that I didn’t deserve (but the way, I later edited/cropped this part of the ride to exclude this bit after the finish, so that order would be restored in the KOM Universe). When I started pedaling again after noticing that my power was hung up at 900 watts, the power dropped back down to normal levels. 

Anyway, I wish this issue didn’t exist, because like I said above, it skews my averages, propels me forward when I take breaks, and can be easily taken advantage of to boost power output during Zwift events. I’ve started taking note of other users that are clearly taking advantage of it (easy to spot Zwifters cruising around at steady watts without pedals moving). 


 

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Any comments on this? I have the same issue now on apple tv. Quite annoying when I want to coast in races!

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