GPS

Measuring speed and distance have been my two main sources of feedback and documentation these past few years of re-emergent cycling. The nice little magnet on my front wheel, the snap-on cyclocomputer, and the ride summary dutifully recorded in my ride log -- the ritual of it had become second-nature. Then, beckoning from the glossy pages of a winter cycling magazine in early 2006, there she was -- the GPS cyclocomputer, a culmination of technology and utility I soon found irresistable.

The Garmin 205 and 305 GPS cyclocomputers have been available all cycling season. Plenty of riders have tried them, and most who have tried them have adopted them. I use mine all the time, every time. But they do have their limitations, including a relatively short battery life and sometimes bewildering "live" readouts. Even then, the way they capture data and the tools available to play with these data make the ritual of using the GPS unit a lot more informative and fun than the old cyclocomputers.

I got my Garmin 205 in early May (the HR monitor and cadence of the 305 didn't seem worth the cost -- I learned how to gauge both my HR and cadence long ago). As a fan of Google Earth and a novice with GPS, I was intrigued to see what the emerging technologies would reveal using geo-location and satellite-enabled speed and grade calculations. I charged the 205 and went for a ride later that afternoon.

At first, I set the display up as if I could and would monitor it at as I rode. I learned not to do that after one good shot into a decent pothole convinced me of my mistake. Also, the real-time readings are often irreconcilable with reality, especially the gradient or grade readings, which can yo-yo between -12% and 24% on the same hill. The reason? It takes strong signals from six GPS satellites to generate an accurate grade reading. Take one or two away, and the little GPS brain gets confused and becomes incoherent. Soon, I learned that one of the nice parts of the GPS unit was that I could review a ride later via software, and recover all sorts of information about gradient and speed, so I didn't have to watch. Better still, the strange readouts magically disappeared when the unit's data were processed in the interpretive software. Great!

Garmin also purchased a cool community-based GPS Web site called MotionBased. This site lets users upload their data, analyze it (in a tool that is even better than the software that ships with the unit itself), and share data with other users. It's a great site, and when I saw that it also acquired the weather data for uploaded rides, I was hooked. The possibilities here are amazing.

Once the data are processed another way, you can upload them into Google Earth, which is a lot of fun, as well. You can share the data with ride buddies, too, so they can keep the ride record themselves, or with people who missed the ride or who want to try it, so they can map the route or see it virtually. Over the course of this season, my ride map on Google Earth is fun to behold, with rides in a number of different states and in some memorable settings. I can "fly" to these rides again, and even compare a previous ride with a new planned ride to see spots of overlap and difference.

The most impressive aspect of the GPS unit is that you get not only hill profiles and fairly accurate altitude data, but you get cumulative climbing data, something that has led to some surprising insights. For example, one local ride of about 65 miles nets more than 8,000 feet of climbing, yet I never knew that. I'd always assumed it was about a mile, so this explained some things. Then, I learned that one monster 200-mile Rocky Mountain ride nets just about the same amount of climbing as the local 65 miler. Comparing these to another local century that generates 9,000 feet of climbing over 100 miles changed my perceptions of difficulty, and made using the 65-mile local ride for training a more attractive because it's a more efficient use of time. Without the GPS telling me all this, I never would have known, and would have assumed the ride in the Rockies generated the most elevation change and steepest climbs of any (another lesson imparted: the Notches (Crawford and Pinkham) in New Hampshire generate some long, steep climbs, some of which can beat those in the Rockies).

My biggest gripe with the Garmins is their battery life. The batteries last with power to spare through a decently paced century, but for multi-day rides with primitive layovers or double-centuries, forget it. You need to recharge it after about 10 hours, max, or the thing just dies. It does retain the data, but you lose even things like average speed for the last 40+ miles or whatever is left. It might be nice to have the unit ratchet down as the battery dies, if that's possible, so that power consumption is constrained to core functions and the battery's life extends toward completion. I'd take a blank display and data acquisition over a dead battery.

Of course, it is also nice to not have a cable dangling from your handlebars or even a wireless magnet against your front fork. The simplicity of using a GPS cyclocomputer is striking -- just give it a minute to find its satellites, snap it on, and go.

My fear getting a GPS was that I was over-engineering my ride, and wasting money. While the latter may still be debatable, the insights I've gained by knowing where I am and how high I've climbed mitigate any doubts. These are pretty cool devices, and they are only going to get smaller, better, and have more utility. Now, about those batteries . . .