Jordan Rapp shared his revelation with us last week. “My cockpit is clean,” he wrote, “And it made me develop a renewed appreciation for having fun.”

I’m all in on that and I’m arm-in-arm with Jordan on 90 percent of what he wrote. I want to talk a little about the 10 percent I think Jordan neglects to appreciate, but also about that 90 percent where, if anything, I don’t think Jordan went far enough. Let’s recap.

“I needed to see the numbers,” he wrote about his days training as a pro triathlete. “The training was the numbers. And the numbers were the training … I also needed that feedback - immediate and omnipresent - to feel complete.”

That doesn’t sound like very much fun. But I think it’s more than just not fun. I don’t believe knowing that number in real time helps nearly as many people as we assume it does. (Jordan, perhaps yes, most of us, no.) And by “numbers” we’re really only taking about one number, aren’t we? Do I even need to name it?

In my opinion, very few of us, other than Jordan, ever need to have that number staring at us while riding. It does one thing more often than any other thing: humiliate and disappoint the user, souring a good ride. We have known all along that riding to that damnable number has to be normalized to account for temperature and humidity and that’s just for a start. We were told that number reflected immediate data rather than heart rate (which reflected what happened to you 5 or 10 seconds ago). But power also reflects what happened 5 or 10 seconds ago depending on your head unit’s settings. In my experience, if you have both power and heart rate displaying on your head unit neither number is more current than the other, and the more you smooth your power – to try to equal the smoothness of your HR – the less relevant that power number is.

It's not that power isn’t useful. I have a power meter on each of my 3 “performance” bikes. (I don’t have a PM on my bikepacking bike.) I think Jordan had it right: “I just like knowing how I did, rather than how I'm doing.” In my opinion most mortal riders do better onboarding that number retrospectively, rather than in real-time. Your coach certainly isn’t crunching that number real time for you; only post-ride.

There have been many debates here on Slowtwitch on HR versus bike power, and most of us who favor HR as a valued metric have just stopped replying, tired of getting shouted down by bike power advocates, and I don’t write this to wade back in. Just, I will note that many training/racing-with-power advocates still do measure heart performance, just not HR. They track HR variability because that metric is sexy and new versus heart rate which is unsexy and old.

“The biggest change I made was that I stopped using a bike computer,” writes Jordan. “I didn't want my power to be staring me in the face every moment of every ride.” The only reason to not want that number staring you in the face is if that number is causing you angst. “A clean cockpit - but with the security of knowing that I have the data if I want it - has been a revelation.” This is where I part ways with my good friend.

I think we all want numbers during our ride that aid us, inform us, challenge us, warn us, but that do not depress or frustrate us. I haven’t had a power number in my face in years. But I’m absolutely attached to my head unit and I’ll tell you why.

Radar: Jordan likes his data on his watch, not on his head unit. But I think there’s a little PTSD going on there and that’s ironic, considering that Jordan Rapp was among the hardest riding, overwhelmingly good cyclists in triathlon when it was his course on his day. But it doesn’t matter how good you are, there’s always that frustration with not getting the number you want staring back at you. So Jordan just gets rid of any display on the handlebar staring at him. But when my Garmin Varia discovers something behind me I like having my Wahoo ROAM showing it to me. I want that “staring me in the face.” Were this the only thing my ROAM did, I’d have the ROAM on my bike for every ride taking place on the road (including gravel rides with a paved component).

Mapping: My wife and I went to Tuscany a few years back and we wanted to ride the famed Strada Bianchi (white gravel). I made routes on RideWithGPS and downloaded them to our ROAMs. We rode by the map every day for a week. Yes, you could do that with a watch, but not very efficiently. I ride new routes frequently, and in remote locations. Mapping is huge.

STRAVA: The segments and live segment functionality in STRAVA creates a dimension of fun that I never did have for the first 30 years of my riding life. Yes, I could do this with my watch – and my Wahoo Rival has almost all the display functionality as does my ROAM – by my watch has other things on it. It’s inconvenient to toggle through pages on that tiny display to get to what I want. God (or whomever) invented the wristwatch for certain things, and bike data isn’t among them.

Climbing: All Wahoo ELEMNT computers come factory set with certain pages: training, mapping, climbing. You can delete, add or customize any of these and it’s the same with Garmin and other head unit brands. I do not find it onerous to keep track of feet of ascent during my rides. It is also helpful to track feet of descent, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is to know what I’m getting myself into by descending an unfamiliar road.

Battery: Here’s what’s probably an inexhaustive list of the batteries on my SRAM AXS-equipped Quintana Roo SR6: Front derailleur, rear derailleur, left and right shifters, Quarq PM, Garmin Varia and of course the head unit itself. That’s at least 7 batteries, 6 of which are not the head unit. I prefer to know the status of batteries on the head unit (more about that in a future installment), because I don’t always remember what I need to charge after every ride and it’s easier having battery status showing on one page on my head unit.

Power: Yes, power. I do like to know my power metrics. Just, I want to know it after I’m finished.

Heartrate: The one performance metric I do want on my head unit is this, because it’s a stable, smoothed, almost-real-time metric that isn’t a proxy for how hard I’m working, it’s how hard I’m working. I know, for example, that if my HR is pegged at 155bpm, my 15-minute clock begins its countdown. (that's how much time I've got in the tank.) Yes, my Wahoo Rival is my HR monitor, but it’s easier to see the HR on my head unit than on my watch.

What Jordan wrote, decoded, was “Take the Head Unit Off Your Bike.” But I *think* he wrote, deciphered, was “Take the power number off your head unit.” I associate myself with that sentiment.