(no subject)

[bill_schubert]

The other thing that doesn't work on my bike now is the computer, the thing that tracks miles and speed and all the rest.  I was going to get a new one but decided to go a different way and downloaded a biking application instead.  One of the advantages is I can pay for it with Google rewards funny money.  Huge advantage.  It gives me a ton of info, the kind of stuff I would have really cared about when I was trying to get better and stronger on the bike.  Now I just want to slow the downward spiral and keep track.   Too much info in general but it is pretty amazing.  This is just one screen I was able to get onto my PC:

It was a five or so mile trail. Green line is elevation. Fairly flat trail. Blue is speed.

All weather and mapping is tracked in real time, of course.  And pages of stats.  If I wore a watch I could have NASA level data recorded for posterity.  This was my trail bike.  Next will be my road bike but a day of rest first.

My hydration worked well.  I'm not thrilled with the way the tube ends where I get the water.  It is not a great execution of design.  It requires me to bite pretty hard on the rubber mouthpiece to get water.  But maybe I can whine a little and get a refit with something newer.  It was nice to have all the water I wanted and I did feel better at the end of the ride.  For this one I drank about 2 and a half liters and sweated most of it out.

Where did all the people come from today?  The walk with Zoe had about twice as many people and the trail was full of them with kids and dogs.  Don't these people work?  I'm ready for school to start and get these urchins off my trail.

Comments

[taz-39.livejournal.com]

Technology is SO COOL.

We are tiny ants crawling on the face of this planet, yet it's possible to know where you are how fast you are moving, maybe even see what you were wearing that day from space. What a time to be alive!

[bill-schubert.livejournal.com]

Agreed. I had paper maps when I first got to Texas in 2005.

[susandennis]

I wondered where all the people were!! Yesterday, both when I took the car and when I came home from the dealership, the traffic was pandemic levels. It was very weird. Now I learn they were all walking in Texas. Even weirder.

[maju01.livejournal.com]

I love getting all that kind of information from my GPS watch after a walk or run. If I still cycled I'd love it for that too.

[bill-schubert.livejournal.com]

I don't like wearing a watch. My sister gifted me her used Garmin when she upgraded and I lasted about six or seven months. Maybe something light enough. I always have my phone though. It doesn't track my vitals much as I'd like but no system is perfect. It is great on the bike since I have it mounted on the handle bars.

[amw.livejournal.com]

Is this what you meant the other day when you were talking about mapping my route on the bike? I can't even imagine what the use of this information would be, unless you were trying to shave milliseconds off some Tour de France segment :)

The best bike app i got is BRouter: https://brouter.de/ It's actually not a standalone app, it's a plugin for OpenStreetMap that allows for setting up different heuristics around how to plan a route. I use OSMAnd+, which you can also get cost- and ad-free on the F-Droid repo, and you can download all the maps and elevation data onto your phone so that you can do route planning without any internet/data access. You can also hack your own profiles to do stuff like avoid hills above a certain grade, or include stairs, or prefer MTB trails to roads. I suspect it might work better in Europe than here, but having just done some cursory noodling around with it, it seems to provide more useful routing suggestions than Google Maps.

[bill-schubert.livejournal.com]

I was just thinking, at the time, that it would be fun to follow your trail but then decided that it was a little presumptuous of me at the least.

[amw.livejournal.com]

Oh, you mean like real-time tracking? That would be cool! I didn't even think about that, i guess i figured nobody would be interested. I was just thinking of posting an update to LJ every few days with some photos like normal. It'd be kinda neat to pop up as a little icon on other people's maps.

[bill-schubert.livejournal.com]

I don't want to be intrusive but it might be a good idea for someone to have a clue where you are. And, yeah, it would be fun to track.