 Hello everyone, my name is Stephen Cousins. Welcome to another Film My Run review. It's time to review the Zwift Run Pod. So let's start off with a little bit of history. Not long ago there was something called the Milestone Pod. It looked something like this. It looked exactly like that, in fact, because that is the Milestone Pod box. It looked like this, okay? That's what it looked like. The Milestone Pod. There. It was initially built for outdoor running, as most foot pods are. You put it on your foot and it measures your cadence and lots of other different metrics. Actually, the Milestone Pod had quite a lot of interesting metrics on the app that you could look at. But it wasn't overly accurate. Even outdoors it wasn't particularly accurate. I would question a lot of the time, you know, the distance that it seemed to calculate on my runs. However, what we started to do was use it on Zwift. The budget way into Zwift was to buy a Milestone Pod. It's that it was the cheapest foot pod out there. Zwift cottoned on to this and thought, this is a good idea. We can get a cheap foot pod for everyone who wants to run on Zwift, encouraging them to get on the platform. A good thing in anyone's book. So what they did a few months ago was Zwift bought out Milestone. So the people who worked for Milestone now essentially work for Zwift and they produced the Zwift Pod. So here is the Zwift Pod. You can see it is very similar to the Milestone Pod. It's like exactly the same box, just a different colour. Exactly the same looking pod, except instead of an M, it's got a Z on it. So the box is, the kind of look of the whole thing is pretty much exactly the same. You can no longer get the Milestone Pod. So from now on it is the Zwift Pod. I mean, you might be able to get a Milestone Pod somewhere a little bit cheaper on eBay or something like that if you really want to, but why would you want to? Why not just get the Zwift Pod, which is going to have better support, long term firmware updates. Hopefully it'll improve over time. So what actually does a foot pod do? What does it do on Zwift? Well, what it does is it's a speed source. So essentially you run on the treadmill and the foot pod detects the movement of your foot, how fast it's going. It detects your cadence and your speed and it sends that to the Zwift app. Whether you're running the app on an iOS device or Android or a computer, PC or a Mac, the Zwift Pod will send information to the Zwift app and the Zwift app converts that into a speed, into a pace on Zwift in the game, allowing your avatar to move within the game. There are a variety of ways of getting your speed into Zwift. So you could have a really expensive treadmill that broadcasts direct from the treadmill to Zwift. Not many treadmills do that, but there are some that do. You can also buy something called a tread tracker, which is a little wheel that goes underneath the belt of your treadmill and measures the speed of your treadmill and sends it to Zwift. But mostly people will be using foot pods. And there are lots of different kinds of foot pods you can use, and some are better than others. The cheapest, the most budget foot pod that you can buy for Zwift at the moment is the Zwift Pod. So what do you do with the Zwift Pod? How do you make it work on Zwift? Do you attach it to your shoe? And I don't know if you can see here, there's a little clip that goes under the laces. So this little clip goes under the laces, then you take the Zwift Pod, so there's the actual pod, and you put it on the shoe. So you can see it's kind of at a little bit of angle, and then you twist it and it clicks into place. And that's how it should be on your shoe. Try not to have it too high up. I recommend you have it as low down on your laces as you possibly can. That's where you wear it. It doesn't matter if you wear it on the right foot or the left foot, it's absolutely fine, makes no difference whatsoever. I have it. I have it so the Z is kind of in line, you know, pointing forwards, whether that makes a difference or not. I don't know. So that's how you wear it on your shoe. And to make sure the pod is working, you can just give it a little tap and you should see a green light. I don't know if it's going to come over on the camera, but we'll have a go. So let's try it. Let's have a look. There you are. There's the green light. If the battery is low, you'll get a red light. I've been running on Zwift now for over two years, and I've used the Mars Stone Pod, and I've used the Zwift Pod, and I've used a variety of other different speed sources as well. As far as I understand it, as far as I'm aware, the Zwift Pod has pretty much the same hardware inside it as the old Mars Stone Pod. The firmware has had some tweaks, but essentially it's the same unit. Now the problem with both of these pods in terms of a speed source on Zwift is that they're not terribly accurate. Obviously it depends what you're judging it against. You might have a really poor treadmill, so you've no idea whether you really are going at 10 kilometres an hour or not. But regardless of whether you've got a good or a bad treadmill, there are some fundamental issues with the Zwift Pod. So let's talk about speed in Zwift to start with. So the Zwift Pod will work fairly accurately without calibration out of the box at around about 12 to 12 and a half kilometres an hour. That's my experience of the Zwift Pod. Uncalibrated, out of the box, brand new, brand new battery inside. You can run on Zwift at around 12 kilometres an hour and you know that you are doing around about 12 kilometres an hour. It's pretty accurate. However below and above that it's incorrect. So if you're running at 7, 8, 9, 10 kilometres an hour, you actually be going too fast on Zwift. So your treadmill will be saying 10 kilometres an hour but on Zwift you'll be reading 10 and a half, 11 kilometres an hour. So the foot pod is running too fast on Zwift. If you go faster than 12 kilometres an hour, 13, 14, 15 kilometres an hour on your treadmill say, the Zwift Pod will never get there on the Zwift game. So it's running too slow. So you'll be working harder and harder to achieve 14 kilometres an hour on Zwift and your treadmill will be reading 15, 16 kilometres an hour. So around about 12 kilometres an hour you're all good. Anything below that, anything above that, the speed is not accurate. Not accurate enough for you to say this is okay. It's not okay. Now Zwift has a calibration tool built into the software so that when you pair your foot pod you click a little spanner icon and you can go to a calibration tool and that is currently a three-point calibration tool. So it will calibrate at a medium pace, a slow pace and then a fast pace. And in theory that should make your foot pod more accurate. Unfortunately with the Zwift pod it doesn't seem to do that. Calibrating your Zwift foot pod using the calibration tool in Zwift unfortunately at the moment doesn't seem to improve the accuracy of the Zwift pod below and above a certain middle point. In fact some people have reported that when they're trying to calibrate their Zwift pod on the calibration tool when it gets to the highest calibration point it won't even start the calibration tool because the Zwift calibration tool is looking for your foot pod to at least be there or there abouts the speed that it wants to calibrate at. But the Zwift pod isn't accurate enough to even get there so the calibration tool can't start. So some people are saying they can't even calibrate because the tool won't finish the job. So let's just reiterate this one more time. If you're looking to run on Zwift at one pace consistently, say you just want to do 10km at a consistent pace then the Zwift pod will do you just fine pretty much. It's not too bad actually. When you get running you get running at a consistent pace and you stay at that pace as long as it's not too fast or too slow then the Zwift pod is fine. But if you want to take part in some of the Zwift interval sessions, workout sessions where you run very fast for 400m and then quite slowly as a recovery for another 200m, the Zwift pod is not going to handle that very well. The other issue that I know some people have reported are dropped connections. So the foot pod not even starting in the first, not being paired or pairing but the avatar not moving at all within the game. So there are a variety of reasons why your foot pod may not connect properly. The number one issue is battery. Make sure that you have a fully charged or a fresh battery inside the Zwift pod. The Zwift pod takes a standard CR2032 battery. I just buy multi packs of those and I try and put almost a fresh one in every run. I know that's not very cost effective but if you want absolutely to make sure that you have a fresh battery in there then just do that. To be honest I have never with the Zwift pod never had a problem connecting my Zwift pod to Zwift. So every time that I put the foot pod on my shoe and load up Zwift it is there in the pairing screen. Every time I start running the Zwift pod starts running. So I absolutely recommend making sure your battery is a fresh battery. Sometimes people say that taking the battery out and then putting it back in again kind of resets everything and after that everything's fine. Also Bluetooth issues please make sure that you do not have any other Bluetooth devices trying to connect, trying to steal your Zwift pod signal. Bluetooth devices can only have one live connection at a time. So if your Bluetooth foot pod, if your Zwift pod is connected to another app on your phone for example the Zwift app won't be able to see it so make sure no other apps are stealing the Zwift pod connection. Also do try and make sure that your Zwift pod and the device that you're running Zwift on are not too far away. The Bluetooth connection is fairly strong so you know one or two meters should be fine but it's always worth just making sure that you've double checked that. As always make sure that you have the latest firmware. The Zwift pod can now connect to the old Milestone app so go to your device, download the Milestone app and your Zwift pod will connect and will update the firmware so you can make sure that you've got the latest firmware on your device and as time goes by the firmware will be updated and will be improved. So fingers crossed we will get updated firmware which will address some of these accuracy issues within the Zwift game. The thing is you are never going to get the Zwift pod to be as accurate and behave in the same way as a foot pod costing eight times as much. The Stride foot pod is $200 so it's eight times the price of this. You know it's bound to be more accurate. It's bound to be a better foot pod because you're paying for better hardware, more robust hardware and more robust firmware. You just won't get that with a Zwift pod. It's great as a starter device on Zwift. It does work. There are issues with it we know that but it does work for what it's aiming to do which is get you on Zwift the cheapest, quickest way possible. So if you've made sure that you've got a fresh battery in your device that you are not too far away from the app that's running Zwift and that the Bluetooth connection isn't being stolen by any other apps on your phone. If you've made sure you've got the latest hardware your Zwift pod should connect fine to the Zwift app and then once you're in Zwift if you're running at a certain pace, one pace and consistently running at that pace this foot pod will work absolutely fine for you. No worries at all. I carried out a survey on the Zwift runners Facebook page recently just to have a look at what people thought of the Zwift pod. It is a mixed bag but actually if you look at it there are a lot of people who are perfectly satisfied with the Zwift pod. Look at the results here. You can see there's a lot of people who say it's working perfectly fine. It's satisfactory. There are even a few people who say it's brilliant. There are plenty of people yes who say it's very frustrating to use and there are one or two people who damn well want their money back but look at those results and it's actually not that bad. The majority of people are getting this foot pod to work. The majority of people are running satisfactorily using the Zwift pod. Now I know it's frustrating if you're a new runner on Zwift and all you want to do is just get on there and run and enjoy the experience and you find that your Zwift pod isn't connecting and it's not running when you want it to run and then it doesn't seem to run at the same pace as your treadmill is saying that can all be very frustrating and I understand that and you know if the Zwift pod is supposed to be an easy way into Zwift then I understand how frustrating it is if it doesn't seem to be an easy way into Zwift. I know for sure that the Zwift team know about the issues with the Zwift pod. They are addressing the issues. They're looking to do something about it to make this foot pod do what it's supposed to do and do it better than it currently is doing. So this will improve. The Zwift foot pod will improve. Would I recommend the Zwift pod for running on Zwift? Do I recommend the Zwift? Do I recommend the Zwift pod for running on Zwift? That depends. If you are an experienced runner, if accuracy is important to you, if you are going to be doing a lot of interval sessions on Zwift so you're joining Monday Run Club or Wednesday Workout where you're required to run at fast paces and then slow paces and recover then no. I think you need to spend a little bit more money by a stride foot pod or another device, a tread tracker, something like that which will give you more accuracy within the game and it will respond better to changes of speed and pace within the game. But if you're new to Zwift and you just want to get a feel for Zwift, if you want to just have a look at the scenery, run at a steady pace, make sure that you've done all the things I've suggested and the Zwift foot pod will work absolutely fine for you to give you a feel for what Zwift is all about and then as time goes by if you feel that you need to upgrade then upgrade but by then the Zwift pod might have improved so much that you don't need to upgrade at all. So my advice to you would be try it out. It's a great budget way to get into Zwift. If it doesn't work for you then you might be one of those people who does need to upgrade to something like the stride which is going to be a little bit more robust and that's it. That's my review of the Zwift. So where do I point it? So that's it. That is my review of the Zwift pod. Take care guys. See you for the next review. Bye-bye.