My Take on Ride Tracking and GPS Units
There is an entire industry popping up around tracking of fitness activities thanks to the proliferation of smartphones. I am not really going to throw my endorsement behind any one way but I wanted to give my observations of the options out there.
When I first started riding I had an android phone and the only choice for a ride tracking package was a little start up called Runkeeper. Of course now Runkeeper is a Juggernaut that seems to lose sight of what their core user want but that seems to be the way of these small app builders. But I digress. Runkeeper had a unique function built into the app that allowed you to be tracked on a web page in real time with use of your data connection if you paid for the upgrade to an elite account. This was extremely useful for peace of mind for my wife who worries because I ride alone a bunch. I am sure some other apps have this feature by now.
One downside of a phone app, when I started riding, is that you could not collect heart rate information. This was the cornerstone of my weight loss system as I would record my activities with a heart rate monitor to calculate my real calorie burn then adjust intake accordingly. Before I started riding I was doing a class where I ran in a “lazy river”. It was a perfect exercise for someone who was really overweight because it was high heart but low impact on the knees. During this phase of my weight loss I went through about 3 polar heart rate monitors just from pure use. When I graduated to walking outdoors, which I loved because I was tired of looking at gunite, I upgraded to a Garmin Forerunner305 GPS.
Garmin Forerunner 305
The Garmin Forerunner 305 is a workhorse. This GPS was perfect for walking or any other outdoor activity. If you wish to track anything outdoors this watch gps is accurate and reliable as long as you keep the battery charged. I found that the watch would discharge if you left it sitting with no use. The down side of this unit, which I believe is true of most GPS units, it that if you plan to mix your outdoor activities with indoor activities, the GPS is useless. I found this model watch on clearance at WalMart online and was perfectly happy with it. Some people I have read on forums do not care for the unit because the device is rather large. For me this was never a problem because my arms are large. For someone with small arms it could be a problem. The heart-rate monitor never glitched and seemed on par with my entry level heart-rate monitors.
I had been using my Garmin Forerunner and Runkeeper at the same time to gather all the data I needed or walking with the live tacking for much of my active time. To this day I actually still do log all my workouts to my GPS and Runkeeper as a backup in case one fails and they do fail.
The only downside I ever found to the 305 model GPS was that you could not use it for navigation. I do not know of a watch style unit that can give this functionality. I am sure that any other cyclist can share the pain of being lost on a group ride. I was out on a ride in Ft. Worth Texas a year or two ago where the ride course was not very well marked. By lunch time I had been lost 10 times and added hours/miles to a already 75 mile day. Through pure frustration of being lost I did not finish that ride because I was in a town I did not know very well and the heat was getting intense. For the record, I was not the only one. at one point after lunch I was riding behind a team of doctors. After about 5 miles of riding behind them one dropped back to talk to me. He asked me if I was going to finish the ride because they were not and I should stop following them because I was actually following them home. Luckily their way home to that point was on the ride course. I decided right there and then to invest in a GPS unit that had a navigation/map function.
The downside of a phone app or Garmin Forerunner for cycling specifically is that there is no way to gather any telemetry that the phone/GPS itself could not generate, for example cadence. For those who may not know, cadence is a very important measurement of how many times the pedal passes one point in a minute. When you ride any amount of distance cadence becomes important. Cadence should stay around 85 rpm for 90% of the ride is the rule of thumb I have been told. In order to gather cadence data you need anther type of sensor that picks up a magnet placed on the back of the crank that passes a frame mounted receiver. I had used a bike computer to tell me my cadence and speed but that is local information you cannot use anywhere else. To me it is kind of useless because I am a “Analyze it after the ride” kind of guy. With all the challenges facing me I decided to bite the bullet and purchase a Garmin Edge 800.
Garmin Edge 800 GPS
The Garmin Edge 800 was, at the time, was the new GPS on the block with a full touch screen in color. The 800 has a multi-sensor that is mounted to the back part of the bike frame and reads a magnet both on the wheel & crank. The sensor is also wireless which brings a set of challenges of it’s own. The great thing about this setup is that when it works, it work really really well. The down side, when it doesn’t you are resident in a little town I call Screwbopolis.
The good. The GPS gathers every kind of telemetry you could possibly need for a bicycle. the display is very easy to read. When I bought the 800 GPS I was very excited to get out there and use it. I hit the road and discovered to my chagrin that because I wear bifocal glasses I can not read the thing. It is no reflection on the unit, just a funny side affect I never thought of in my planning. I got my hands on some riding sunglasses with bifocal correction soon after purchasing the 800. There are web pages out of the Interwebs that are devoted to teaching the average user to really use the powerful features of the Edge 800. If you were to buy one spend some time on these web pages. It is well worth the time to get all the investment out of the unit. I find the virtual training partner to be annoying but I am not a racer so it means little to me. The turn by turn directions and map features are fantastic. There is very little change of getting lost especially if you pre-load a ride course because the GPS will squawk if you get off course. The battery life on the unit is fantastic as well. I have never had a problem on exceptionally long rides with any chance of the battery going dead. The heart-rate monitor built into the Edge 800 is as accurate as the data I collected with my old Polar heart-rate monitors. Polar is industry accepted as the most accurate HRM in the world.
The bad. The speed that the Edge 800 reports is NOT collected via satellite data. I was actually somewhat shocked to learn this fact. The speed is calculated by the unit based on a initial calculation the device makes when you initialize the GPS. The Edge takes the GPS reading and does some nature of math to calculate the wheel side your bike has on it. Once it has that wheel size calculation it is static. If you are a person like me that has several sets of wheels for different types of riding there can be deviation from the real speed/distance when you change out wheels unless you are willing to re-initialize the device every time you change wheels. The other problem with this limitation is if you have a wheel that stops reading through the sensor, you no longer get a speed reading at all. This is part of the reason I track rides with Runkeeper to this day. When you do have problems the support FAQs are useful but the troubleshooting is very difficult to perform and requires several resets of the devices. The problems, in my experience, have been random. I can be riding on mile 50 of a 70 mile ride and the speed sensor just stops working.
I will say also that the Garmin Support team is phenomenal. I recently had the speed sensor stop working and I had done every reset/troubleshooting top possible. I contacted Garmin support and told them what I had done then without hesitation received a RMA for my GPS. The down side is that I was without my GPS for a few weeks because of shipping. At Garmin’s request I sent only the GPS without the memory card that holds the maps. About a week and a half later I had a new GPS with all the accessories that came with my bike package. I mounted up the GPS and still had an intermittent speed sensor so had to cut off the multi-sensor and replace with the new one. I am happy to report the unit is back to rock solid. If you choose to invest in a device of this quality you can sleep easy at night knowing that Garmin stands behind their products.
When you start riding you search for an app for a smartphone, these days, that can track your rides. Having a web page to go to and see your achievements is huge in keeping you motivated to ride. As I said earlier, now there are quite a few apps for tracking cycling/running.
Several friends use Strava which is much more of a competition app because on segments of any road/trail you can compete against everyone else who has taken the ride. Strava has been taking heat from some corners of the cycling community as of late because there is a notion that Strava is ruining the “brotherhood of riding”. Some people take these competitions very seriously and will blow past you because they are on a “Strava Run”. The other perceived downside is that some people are really taking chances with dangerous riding in order to try to beat times and putting their own health in jeopardy. This is really more prevalent in the mountain bike community, but still, it is a concern. I don’t really judge because I am not competitive enough to use Strava in that manner and since I have 3 years of riding history banked up in Runkeeper, it is very hard to move.
There are several other apps including a new kid on the block that has been getting press lately called “Map My Tracks”. The only real thing I have read about Map My Tracks that is compelling is that it has a live tracking feature like Runkeeper elite. I might give it a look if it performs better than Runkeeper but the chances f switching are kind of slim. I hate to give up my history. Runkeeper servers seem to crash every so often and it is very annoying. Usually about the time they add features nobody wants. This could be the thing that gives me the push to a new application.
There are now even hardware parts you can plug into your smartphone to make it have all the features/telemetry of the Garmin Edge 800. The most popular package from my research is called Wahoo. This package has all the bells and whistles of a Garmin with a wireless cadence sensor and everything but is only available on IPhone. I for one am a Android user so there is no love here for me and I will probably never own an IPhone again. The double edge sword of using a smartphone in my opinion is that it is not a dedicated recording device for your data. If your phone rings or gets busy with another function it could interrupt your telemetry recording. I have seen it over and over with Runkeeper as they tweaked their application through the last few years.
That is pretty much my take on recording of ride data. I really encourage everyone to track their ride data in some way. If it be to improve performance or just motivation to ride more, the data is priceless in helping you. I very much encourage you to get or use some nature of real heart-rate monitor. Applications like Strava or Runkeeper wildly overestimate your calorie output. You see something that reads your heartbeat and calculates the actual burn.
I hope some of this information if useful to anyone looking to get a GPS or use a smartphone app. When I initially looked to buy my Edge GPS I could find very little about the device in real people feedback.
That’s all I know for now..
Rob
enduranceride 