Stephen Skory

Wow. Here’s a whole bunch of rides:

An easy jaunt down & around Mission Bay. April 9, 2005.

To the top of Torrey Pines in Del Mar & back. A quick little ride. April 11, 2005.

Oceanside and back. April 13, 2005.

Lakeside; I battle 15mph winds for half of the ride, by myself. Ugh. April 14, 2005.

Scripps Poway with Tona and Chris. I do this ride 15 minutes faster than the last time I did it. April 16, 2005.

Hwy 56 and Rancho Santa Fe. I really like this ride. Maybe it’s because of the part next to Hwy 56 where there are no cars and no pedestrians to get in the way. April 20, 2005.

Coastal to Oceanside. I rode all the way to the Camp Pendelton gates & asked a guard if cyclists are indeed allowed to once again cross the base. It is true! You & I can look forward to a century ride to San Clemente and back. April 21, 2005.

I go up Via Capri to the top of Soledad Mountain, but very, very slowly. I turn out a 7 minute kilo. Scorching! April 22, 2005.

Here are the maps for the first four rides I uploaded to Motionbased. If you click on the images you will be taken to the page on the motionbased site for that ride. I particularly like the black & white topo maps. I think you’ll have to be a little patient for the images to load. Motionbased makes the images dynamically.

My first ride, April 3, 2005, an out-and-back to the top of Scripps Poway:

Another out-and-back. This time up the coast to Encinitas. April 6, 2005.

I call this ride “Del Mar Steepness.” I basically ride up and down some of the steep hills in Del Mar. April 7, 2005.

Pomerado is a good ~3 hour ride. It’s one of the few true loops in this area. Most rides I do have some overlap in route. April 8, 2005.

The Garmin 301 Forerunner, which I’ve mentioned before on this site comes with a velcro wrist band. Which is great for running but when I cycle I prefer to have nothing on my wrist. Whatever I have on my wrist tends to slide down and rest against the top of my hand (because my wrist is bent upwards holding the handlebars). The skin then gets pinched whenever I go over a bump – which is often.

But my anal-retentiveness doesn’t stop there! Simply putting the unit on the handlebars wouldn’t suffice. I prefer to have nothing at all on the handlebars because I shift my grip over the entire width of the bars. I wanted the unit front and center, where it belongs, anyway. I knew I had to be creative!

I have faced this problem before mounting a Polar HR unit in front of the handle bars. That time I built an aluminum mount that was wedged between the stem and faceplate. That has since broken (it wasn’t the best design anyway). I wanted something similar.

So here it is, a funky bike mount:

I used a Polar HR mount (similar to this one) with a piece of PVC pipe stuck inside of it. I then used four zip ties (two in tandem at a time) to attach the mount over and under the handlebars and around the stem. I also used some pieces of rubber to make the whole arrangement thicker so the watch band would be tight. Luckily for me there was a small hole between the polar mount and the front of the stem where I could fit a band:

The 301 uses the normal wristwatch style attachment with the pins, so I just bought a cheap drug store plastic band a cut down one side so it could fit through the hole pictured above. You can see that the band has been slimmed:

The mount isn’t the most steady – the unit does shake. But I think it’s pretty sturdy and I’m confident that my gadget won’t go flying.

I recently bought a Garmin 301 Forerunner, a nifty wrist-sized GPS unit with a heart rate monitor. The premise is pretty cool – I can see my heart rate next to the elevation profile of my route, along with an interactive map showing exactly where I went (once I upload the data to a computer, of course). I’ve been without any kind heart rate or cyclometer for almost 6 months since my old Polar S510 decided to croak. Apparently my sweat is so caustic that I rusted one of the buttons stuck and I lost some functionality. Then the battery died. A perfect excuse to upgrade, right?

Even before I bought the 301, I knew that it would have some problems. Specifically, Garmin is one of those block-headed companies that refuses to acknowledge Mac owners as more powerful than their market share suggests. We spend more money and buy more gadgets than Windozes people; see the iPod. I purchased the 301 anyway; I have an unconditional satisfaction guarantee with REI in case I give up on this project.

My hope was to to be able to use the 301 with Virtual PC. This is one of the first GPSes to use USB, rather than the antiquated serial that manufacturers still cling to. So I figured it may just work with VPC. However, no luck. It seems like it almost works – when I plug the GPS in Win XP recognizes the device and loads the Garmin USB GPS driver. The GPS shows up correctly in the device profile. I can install the Garmin software perfectly too. However, the Garmin software refuses to connect to the GPS. Very frustrating.

I verifed how it should work by using a regular PC, and I had no problems. Both the Garmin and MotionBased software works. Here is my first upload of a ride to MotionBased.

MotionBased is also annoying. The upload program is only Windows. The main interface is entirely web-based, but has poor Mac support. It makes Safari crash and I have had middling success using IE or Firefox. They have a free account option with limited functionality, and for $100/year the full suite of analyses. It’s unlikely I’ll be shelling out any money to them until they improve Mac support.

Right now I’m leaning to keeping the 301. I have enough access to Windoze machines to be able to use it. But I’ll keep it begrudingly. Garmin is a big enough company to put some time into Mac OS X.