Yet Another Fricking Blog

I bike commute from my neighborhood (Montrose and Damen) to my work, at the Adler Planetarium. Usually I take the bike path, because it’s faster (so I can sleep in longer.) It’s about 9.5 miles each way. When it snows or is icy the park district can’t always keep up with the path so I’ll typically take Damen down to Lincoln, then that to LaSalle south to the loop, then just bop around until I’m either at Roosevelt or over by 11th st and Michigan to take the bridge.

While on my ride home last Thursday, I noticed a bunch of people with bikes down by the Shedd Aquarium. And I mean about as far down as you can go, which is not an easy place to get to on a bike. They were riding around, so I met them on the other side and asked them what was going on. They gave me a flyer for their upcoming race, called ‘Stairmaster’. It was the sixth and final race in the Tour Da Chicago 2007 alleycat series. (I wish I’d have known about the Bricklayer… I coulda been a contenda…) So they invited me along for the rest of the ride.

From that much of the ride, I was interested to do the race, but wanted to see the rest of the course first, just to make sure I could hack it. I’d just got my new nerdy GPS cyclocomputer and thought that this would be a perfect way to try it out. I figured out a way to load the course in, so it’d help me in case I got lost. Didn’t work out that way.

I went to ride the course on Friday night, and found the first few locations just fine. But when I got to the stairs at the SE corner of Adams and the river (just west of wacker), I found myself in this weird little narrow space. And it got pretty tight, pretty fast. I ended up pushing my bike in front of me, on an angle so it’d fit under the bridge supports… on a narrow plank walkway, rotted in places, with a rickety railing. In some places the boards below had rotted out and someone had just laid a newer board across the top. I got out from over the water and the path wound behind a bunch of industrial cooling equipment, then through some new construction and over a bunch of newly mulched trees. I wound up at a dead-end; the next bridge had one of those starburst gates on it (like down at the marina) to keep anyone from going around the outside of it, and off to the left was a fence, most of which was covered with barbed wire. D’oh.

I ended up considering my options, then ended up heaving my bike over the fence and going over after it, in the only non-barbed-wire bit. The whole while I’m thinking, “Man, either this race is a bit too hard-core for me or I took a wrong turn somewhere — I didn’t see any of this crap in the video that guy posted of a pre-ride…” So I tore up my pants really well, which sucked (they were Burley rain pants, and those guys stopped making clothing). And I ended up on Lower Wacker, which if you’ve ever been on it… is like a racetrack. The 30 mph speed limit signs are just there for decoration, everybody goes like 55+. So I got to bike out of there and try to find my way back onto the course. Anyway, I ended up figuring it all out, went back to the Adams / Wacker thing and figured that out too, etc.

Saturday rolled around. Had a nice big breakfast with the Jeskeys at the Heartland cafe, then we went looking for some stuff to patch up my pants, but it was looking pretty hopeless. So I got some other stuff together and headed down there. Stopped by this place at Racine and School called Higgins (packed with drunk green-wearing morons) to meet up with Mike and Brian (who was in town to get looped) for a few, then threaded my way down through that garbage … people puking, people trying to hail cabs (standing in bike lanes, not looking, etc), pedestrians starting fights with people in cars… fun times.

I got down to Garfield park, tossed in my five bucks and got a manifest. Glad I brought extra safety pins, I put it on my sleeve. There were probably about 100 people there and I figure maybe about 70 of them were racing, it was hard to tell. We went on the pre-ride (neutral lap) around 7:45, and between having 70 people walking down the same circular stairs at Roosevelt and the lake (to the Amtrak service drive) it took a while.

We got back to the start point around 9 pm and the race started about five minutes later. I stayed in a decent spot but I think I was just being fairly cautious about lights and oncoming traffic (staying alive has its pluses), so I fell back a bit. For the most part I felt I did okay because I don’t think I got passed much, and managed to catch up to people here and there. At some point the GPS thing shut itself off, oh well. I got a bunch of bruises from banging into stuff too. Ended up finshing around 10:30 (I think) which I figure is pretty good because I normally do 9 miles in 30 minutes, averaging around 19 mph. Add one minute for each flight of stairs (there’s 15 of them or so) and that’s 45 minutes. So I consider that decent.

I finished 23rd, though like I said I’m not sure out of how many — maybe 70? I’m happy with it for a first race and want to stay tuned for upcoming stuff.

There was a party afterwards, but a bunch of us went to a taqueria first — good thing because I only had $7 on me — so I missed hearing who won and all that. Free beer, whatver. Interesting to see how different groups of people knew each other, what they do in real life, etc.

Then I rode home, straight up Damen. I figure it was like a 50 mile day, 18 of which were the race.

So I’ve been nerding out for a while now over cyclocomputers. How fast am I going, what’s my cadence, all that junk. Until recently I had the CatEye Dual Wireless with cadence. I broke the cadence sensor arm twice. Using the scientific method I determined that: their design sucks.

I bought the Garmin Edge 305 cyclocomputer (with GPS, barometric altimeter, speed/cadence sensor, and heart rate monitor) last week; I’d been reading reviews of it since they came out with a Mac version of their software in January, but didn’t have the money until the last toy was paid off (a NAS for our camp). I got it on Friday, installed it and did a test ride to the bike shop (I needed a new cassette; I got a new chain and it was skipping. Goodbye to another $50. Ah well.) The cadence and speed sensor is nicer because it doesn’t have an arm on the cadence side; it’s built into the body of the device, so you just angle it over toward the crank arm. Much better. I downloaded the test ride data, and it plotted my course, broken up into laps (whenever I hit the lap button it divided) on a map of Chicago.

Since I’m a nerd who loves data I figured I’d spring for the model which also has a heart rate sensor. You wear it around your chest and it sits right below the breastbone. It slips a little but I probably just need to adjust the elastic thing.

The main cyclocomputer comes with two mounting brackets, plus a rubber wedge to angle it up if you mount it on the stem, which I did. Out of the bag, the brackets are pre-threaded with cable ties; one bracket is aligned vertically (to go around the handlebar) and one horizontally (to go around the stem.) However, if you remove the cable ties, you can easily pull the bracket apart and turn it 90 degrees. This was helpful because I broke one of the brackets within one day of getting it. (Be careful, they’re fragile.)

I also lost the cadence magnet within a day of getting it. Oops. Fortunately I had the one left over from my cateye so I just put it back on. (I am not nice to this stuff, I guess.)

The Mac software can do workouts and receive a data history from the device and convert that into a course. However, it cannot read in course files (*.crs) like the PC software can. The mac version can display two graphs; the PC version can simultaneously display 4, though that’s fairly spammy, trying to see all the different legends. The PC version can also let you click on a specific point and see the exact data for that point; the Mac version isn’t there yet. (Surprise!)

I think the device was programmed before the new daylight savings time stuff went into effect, which just means that the clock will probably be wrong for a while. It’s not bugging me enough right now to try and work on the issue but it makes me wonder whether users can do firmware updates, or if that happens automatically through the software or what.

The map function is pretty cool but I haven’t been able to figure out how to ‘pan around’ the display; the up/down arrows zoom in and out and the map is centered around your current position.

There’s the barometric altimiter, which supposedly helps improve the accuracy of the height measurements (there is a nice screen with a graph of altitude; you can zoom in and out of it), but I think that if you put the device in a pocket, or go indoors, there’s enough of a change in air pressure that it’ll screw up the readings.

So… I guess that means it’s important to hit the start/stop button whenever you’re going to do that. It’s easy for me to forget because the CatEye had the auto start/stop that was pretty useful, and it didn’t have a ‘history’ so I’d just reset it whenever I started a new ride, making sure I’d written down the previous info. I’m still trying to get used to the idea of holding down the lap/reset button for 3 seconds to ‘clear’ the previous ride and start a new one. Some little part of me says, “Is my old ride still going to be there..?” It at least seems to be smart enough to start a new ride when you’ve downloaded the data; I noticed the clock reset to zero after downloading today’s ride.

The auto start/stop function can be triggered when you come to a stop, or when you go below a certain speed. At first I thought that sounded pretty cool but at one point it got pretty annoying, so I turned it off.

I also had an issue when I was working with the device indoors. It had lost the GPS signal and helpfully offered to continue without the GPS receiver turned on, to save battery power. That’s cool, I thought, and said yes. Then I totally forgot about it when I got outside and didn’t have any positioning data for my whole ride. Once it’s off, it has no reason to check for a signal, to save power. Common sense, but an easy mistake to make.

In trying to get ready for a race, I found this website that a guy from the UK had written. More info about it on this page. That generated a GPX file, which I was then able to upload to this page and convert into a Course (*.crs) file. Then I brought it into the PC-only version (as of this writing there was a new version on March 7, 2007; make sure you have at least that version) and was able to upload it to the device. What a pain.

Anyway, once the course was on the device, I went to the ‘Training’ menu and picked ‘Courses’, then ‘do course.’ There’s an option there to ‘edit course’ but I haven’t tried that yet. So I tried to ride the course I’d programmed while doing the ‘neutral lap’ of a race (one up front to get everyone familiar with the course), and it was complaining whenever it ‘lost course’ or ‘found course’, etc. And I’m thinking, “SHUT UP! Just… record data!” So I didn’t end up using it during the actual race, I just started the timer. I wonder if it’s because of the unorthodox way I programmed in the course (described above.)

If the courses thing worked better, it would be pretty cool; there’s a separate main screen that is specific to a course, that lets you see different subscreen views by pressing enter, like a map on the lower half with speed up top, or whatever. Or course-specific altitude, etc.

When the device loses GPS (like when you’re on Lower Wacker drive…) it puts up an alert that requires you to hit the enter button to acknowlege that. And again… it’s like… SHUT UP! I wish there were an option to make those non-fatal alerts time out and disappear after a certain number of seconds.

There’s a navigation section, which lets you find waypoints you’d previously marked, including a big compass display. I suppose that’d be useful when trying to get somewhere and you’re not familiar with the territory, or if you were on a geocaching trip or something.

The backlight is nice, and can be configured to stay on for different durations — including to not turn off. That’s pretty nice if you’re all about the numbers even when it’s dark. It automatically comes on when you push a button and it’s dark out. Not sure if that’s time based or light level based or what.

Some of the assumptions that the device makes when it isn’t receiving data are just downright stupid. Or maybe it’s just the software. Regardless, I’ve apparently gone speeds of 1011.5 mph, burned 63,715 calories, etc. Not sure if that was tied to losing GPS or being turned off and back on during a ride, or what.

I’m still keeping my Excel spreadsheet each day, as best I can from the data… at least until there’s a stable version of rouleur-log to use, of course. I tried the motionbased website and it didn’t seem to work properly, even after I installed the Safari-only plugin, etc. But I’ll probably try it again, look at it from a PC, and try to at least get a good idea of what it’s capable of doing. Maybe it’ll give us some ideas for rouleur-log, anyway.

Overall conclusion: I’m happy with the thing, I’m sure I haven’t found all of its cool features (or annoying bugs) yet, but so far I’m having fun with it and it’s giving me more data. And, uh, that’s what it’s all about, right…?