Before you step out the door to ride you have to make decisions. Do I wear the blue gloves or the red gloves? The white shoes or the black ones (I don’t own white shoes so this is an easy one)?  For some people they have to decide which bike to ride. I can make that choice but it is between my road bike and my mountain bike, not quite an even exchange. Today I decided to add an extra section to my normal route to Huffman. The clouds are thicker than yesterday but the temperature is a little lower; 77 degrees at the start (71% humidity) and 84 degrees at the end (64% humidity). The wind has picked up some to 8 mph from the southeast. This played apart in my route choice because I find it is better to face the wind at the beginning rather than at the end.

The ride seemed to be going as planned until about the 12.5 mile point when my speed per the Garmin Edge 500 dropped to around 11 or 2 mph but I felt like I was pedaling at a 17 or 18 mph pace. I also noticed that the distance counter was not recording the miles that I knew I should have covered. As I rode on I thought the problem might be the battery in the ANT sensor unit. I have not replaced the battery so far this year so that might have caused this sudden slowdown and mileage error. Not having a battery I stopped to adjust the magnet on my rear wheel to position it to the ANT sensor but this did not help much. I rode on thinking that I will need to replace the battery when I get home. I decided to stop once more to try adjusting the magnet and moved it to align with the mark on the sensor and then rode off. Now the sensor was back to normal showing a realistic speed but the miles were lost so when I uploaded the trip to Garmin Connect it showed an average speed of 13.7 mph while SportTracks shows 15.1 mph. The distance difference is about 3 miles less at GC versus SportTracks as well. For a time I was thinking the wind and legs were against me but now I know the Garmin was the problem, mostly.

Below is the SportTracks data with the correct route mileage of 29.90, average speed 15.1 mph, max speed of 21.0 and average cadence 79.6 RPM (which is probably wrong since it comes from the same sensor). Now my October miles are up to 166.54, this week is 141.31 and year to date is 4407.88. Further down is a new view of my ride from Ridewithgps.com. This confirms my ride data as well. The map at Ridewithgps is interactive and you can play to route. also you can mouse over a give point on the route and it shows the data at that point. Click on the double chevron at the top of the map to move the data tables out of the way.

10-7-2011 Bicycle Ride Data and Route Map

10-7-2011 Home Weather End

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