Satellite-free, and happy

My interest in GPS gizmos has come to an end. When I received this Garmin unit as a gift two or three years ago, it was a fun gadget. It put cool lines on a Google Earth map to show where I'd been. When I added a road bike to the mix, it allowed me to use one computer on two bikes, saving me some money in the process.

But that was about it. One advantage of Alaska's limited trail system is that a basic map does the job just fine. The Garmin was just a too-complicated way of tracking speed and mileage: Its battery always had to be charged, and every time I turned it on I had to wait a couple of minutes for it to start communicating with satellites.

Recently, the damned thing started turning itself off during rides. A firmware update helped, but only a little. It was still unreliable, and other Garmin owners told me they were experiencing the same problem.

So before today's trail ride, I pulled an old Cateye bike computer out of the pile of crap on my workbench, where it had been buried for two seasons during my flirtation with the high-tech toy. I mounted it on the bike, took it for a ride, and it performed flawlessly for five hours.

No muss, no fuss. Reliable as hell. I don't even have to turn it on—it wakes up when the wheel rolls. I'd already put a wireless Cateye on my road bike 10 days ago, and I love it.

Somewhere around here, I've got a box full of computer cables and other miscellaneous electronic junk. Soon as I find it, I'm throwing the Garmin in there, too.

Simplicity

I seem to be in something of a technological paradox. My bikes keep getting more expensive and high-tech, while my interest in collecting digital details of my rides seems to be fading fast. Until a couple of years ago, I kept a detailed ride log on a PDA each season. Then I set up a winter bike without a computer and learned to enjoy ignoring cumulative miles.

Now I have this fancy, GPS-enabled bike computer and I'm finding that, more often than not, I'm either not bothering to use it, or ignoring the ride data after I get home. I sat down tonight and uploaded profiles of four rides, but couldn't remember three of them well enough to give them a description or title, so I just deleted them. The only one I salvaged was last weekend's ride with Ken, which is shown here.

I'm not even bothering to reset the mileage on the (relatively) old-school Cat Eye bike computer that's still mounted on my mountain bike. Basically, I have no idea how many miles I've ridden so far this year. And I don't really care.

It's way more fun to simply enjoy the feel of a fast, hard-leaning curve on my road bike or a fast, swooping descent on my trail bike. As long as I'm spending enough time on my bikes to be happy, and my gut isn't not spilling over my belt too much, I really don't give a damn how far I've ridden this year.

I'll keep tracking miles or ride profiles when I'm in the mood, or if there's a good reason to collect the data. Otherwise, I'll just continue to find myself looking down at the empty handlebar mount where my computer should be as I think to myself, "Oops, I forgot the computer again.

"Wow, this bike is fun to ride."

GPiSsed

My mother-in-law is visiting right now, and she asked if I’ve been using the Garmin Edge 205 she sent me for Christmas. I told her I don’t fully understand all the things it can do, because I mostly use it just to put squiggly lines on Google Earth photos so that I can see where I've ridden.

This image of Potter Valley Road is a good example. The road is very popular with local cyclists who climb it—often several times in a single session—for springtime workouts. I’ve been riding it quite a bit this year, so one night a couple of weeks ago, I reset the 205 at the bottom of the hill and then stopped it at the end of the pavement so I could get all the pertinent numbers on the climb.

I can gasp my way up this climb in a little less than 14 minutes (way slower than the people who actually race up it). It is 1.89 miles from the bottom to the top, which involves 621 feet of elevation gain. The grades run as steep as 11 percent. I know this because I was dumb enough to include that information among the fields of data displayed on the screen.

I’m still not sure if there is any good reason to know, at the moment one is grinding up an 11-percent grade, that the hill is actually that steep. It can sort of make a person want to head-butt his bike computer with his helmet. I don’t dare try this, of course, because in my oxygen-deprived state I’d be more likely to slam into my stem and suffer disfiguring facial trauma.

But it sure makes a neat squiggly line on the satellite photo, though, doesn’t it?