Two techie matters have occupied my mind of late. Firstly, I've been using Endomondo since Week 1 of my Tour. I selected this performance tracking application after a quick review of what I knew was on the market at the time and over the 5 months since, it has served me very well. Then, in last week's Cycling Weekly, I spotted an article where local authorities were attempting to get Strava, another cycling app, to take routes off their time challenge site which were encouraging unsafe cycling along e.g. narrow towpaths! I then noticed that two of my fellow cyclists, one on the Thursday night ride out with the AVP and another of my FB friends, were both using Strava. I had to take a closer a look.
In my view, Strava is not as intuitive an app on the smart phone as Endomondo but it does look slick. This is true of the web app too. What I particularly like is the lack of adverts even for non-pro users. I disliked the ads that MapMyRide filled my screen with and paid a nominal fee to remove these from Endomondo. Strava definitely has more of a competitive approach to its set up. Whatever route you take, Strava will provide a set of split times for previously identified sectors and then captures your performance to compare against every other user who has ridden the same route. This then gives you a relative position against your peers. It could get competitively addictive!
Something else Strava offers, is the ability to create a community for your Cycling Club to group and compare performance stats. It also makes available a couple of HTML widgets to share this information on members' personal blogs. I'm in techie heaven ... you can see these now added to the right margin (unless you are reading this at some time in the future and I've removed them!). The Axe Valley Pedallers (AVP) community was already set up so all I had to do was to join. On doing so, I saw that there were only 3 others who have done likewise .. so not all are obviously that blown away by this technology - hey ho, welcome to my world!
The challenge I have now, is that if I were to switch to Strava, I would lose all my training history with Endomondo, which I am not going to do. So for the time being, I am dual running with both apps to enjoy the benefits each community offers and will see how practical this is over the longer term.
The second technology matter relates to the hardware. I've been looking, since that first week, for the best way of attaching my smartphone to my bike, so that I can visually track my progress in real time. I've tried attaching it to the handle bars but this has proven messy and visually unsuccessful. I have also had issues with the apps multitasking with, e.g. Text and Camera, such that I'm always relieved on returning returned home to find that my route has been saved. Years ago, I used a smartphone, with mixed success, as a SatNav device for my car. When I tired of this, I bought a TomTom unit. The quality and ease of use was a measurable improvement and the same again was true when I upgraded to a car with an inbuilt SatNav system. The lesson learned here is that something designed for a single purpose is usually better at it than one purporting to do many. So you can guess where I'm going here ... yes I'm looking at what Garmin are offering by way of dedicated GPS Cycling Computers. What I have also discovered, is that a Garmin unit will also allow me to upload my cycling data to both Endomondo and Strava, may be this will be a solution to both my technology challenges. More on this later in the week.
Back to the purpose of me having a bike ... riding it. I did get out today. Not this morning, an early business call put paid to that, but a post work evening ride, something which has become more frequent of late. My route was the favoured 3 hills to Colyton circuit with the addition of a reverse ride along the Route 2 wetlands cycle path. I'd not done the cycle path in the north to south direction before and I found it a much better direction from a scenic perspective to cycle. The 13.7mph headwind from Colyford back to Seaton was amazing, it took quite some effort and I would have welcomed a Tasmanian Richie Porte to pull me along!
Stats: 10.23 mi, 49m:01s, Avg 12.5 mph, Max 30.7, 543 kcal
Blimey dude, almost forgot about the cycling with all that techie talk! Art wise I'm thinking wistful beaver with a grumpy parrot on his head!
ReplyDeleteHaha, so true on both counts! Disappointing to hear rain lashing down on the window out there. No ride again this morning. Hoping it dries up for another evening ride :-)
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