Lanebreak from Peloton Announced on February 17 and My Experience with Lanebreak

Earlier this week, Peloton announced Lanebreak which is a new game mode that Peloton has offered to create a game mode for when doing bike ride. I tried the new Lanebreak on Thursday evening for my ride. It was a fun ride using the resistance knob to change lanes, it is a fairly easy process and allows for gathering points by changing the resistance knob to hit certain markers in the game. Turning to the left (less resistance) takes you to the left and turning the resistance knob to the right takes you to the right. Easy enough to follow and do the game. 

I started off on the easy mode to see how it would work. The first thing I noticed and later read on a 9to5Mac article was that Apple Watch could not be used for Lanebreak. The 9to5Mac article went on to say how silently Apple Watch had been removed from many of the workouts on Peloton except for those that are bike riding. As I mentioned, I went on a span of a few months where I was not using Peloton at all and then the past few months I have only done bike riding. Thus, I had not noticed that the Apple Watch had disappeared from weight lifting, meditation, jogging, etc. It seems like an odd thing to do especially when Peloton is struggling and there are discussions of being bought out by another company (i.e. Apple, Amazon, Nike, etc.). Especially for Peloton to remove the option quietly without any notice of the feature disappearing. 

Back to my experience on the Lanebreak feature. I did enjoy my ride and I had a good workout. It was fun because using the resistance knob to change lanes on the track, it took away that I was increasing or decreasing resistance. I was riding and realized I was going 115 with resistance at 45 or 50 and because I was playing a game, I did not realize I had it set so high or going so fast. There is a heads up display as shown on the Lanebreak blog site showing your resistance, speed, etc., but when playing the game the focus is not on those items and instead focusing on get points. Obviously, that is the point of the game.

I do enjoy using the bike with my Apple Watch, so I know that Lanebreak is in test mode as it said on the screen there might be bugs that I had to agree to before using Lanebreak. I am hopeful that at some point Apple Watch will be included in this new feature. For now, Lanebreak will likely be something I try once or twice a month, but for my regular workouts, I will continue to do “normal” bike rides on my Peloton.