Week 1 Review Part 1 – Wow I’ve learned alot

Well, a little more then one week under the belt, and holy crap – I’ve learned alot about my body, my bike, and climbing hills.

Let’s start out with getting on the road. I’ve finally gotten a routine down that for the most part I’m ready with in 5-10 minutes of when I say I will be. Being packed in the car and on the bike before 7am isn’t easy. Now that the Stanley Cup Playoffs are over, this should be a bit easier as I’m trying to get to bed by 10pm each night. (Not my style.) I’m considering shipping some stuff back home, as I’m a chronic over packer (the Potters have already shipped stuff home.

Next up – electronics. I can’t even begin to describe how grateful I am that I bought a Garmin 810 a month ago. (Learn all about it here.) First – I’ve never had turn by turn directions for riding before. I’ve always tried using my iPhone and gone as far as buying the full Wahoo suite of products (iPhone mount & ANT+ sensor + external battery.) This ended up being fail for a few reasons – one big one was that one of my gmail accounts requires a phone password and while – yea it’s a pretty good idea – if your phone locks while you are riding entering a PIN to see your speed/stats/etc is kinda lame. In addition – when going on long-ish rides – say 40 miles – I start to battle the battery gods. Between GPS, grabbing sensor data once per second, and just normal activity (incoming email, and whatever else an iPhone does to suck down your battery) I’d be down to like 30% half way through my ride. The only solution I found that saved my battery was to turn off cell service – but what good is that. Anyhoo – the Garmin has been brilliant once I got the Lower 49 states maps loaded (more on that in a bit). So – turn by turn directions – brilliant! Bruce maps out the ride the night before – emails me a GPX file, I load it and off we go. If we run into a problem with a confusing turn or anything – we have full maps right on us, as well as auto re-routing to get us back on route. Finally – after a 70 mile ride I still had 56% battery left. The only thing this thing doesn’t do is tell me the weather – we’ll it does if I let it pair to my phone via bluetooth – but I’d rather have a charged phone in case I need it than the weather as we check it pretty often.

OK – so there are 2 ways to buy maps for your Garmin 810. The easy way (which Bruce did) is to buy the SDCard with the required maps preloaded at Performance Bike or REI, plug it in and you are done. Well since I don’t have either of those around – and I bought my Garmin very shortly before my trip, I chose the download route. So for $59.99 you insert a SDCard in your Garmin, then you download it and you are done. Turns out – this is kinda true – you just have to wait like – overnight… I had to start the download, configure my laptop not to go to sleep, and wait overnight. They finally updated (after like 5 tries – even one with Windows) and I had the maps.

Also – between Bruce and I – we are seeing some elevation differences of about 10-15 percent. I need to look into if I need to calibrate mine or something.

In Part 2 of this post – I’ll talk about what I’ve learned regarding Nutrition, Climbing and Pacing myself.