I’ve taken up cycling again, its been a while since I last cycled anywhere – about 8 or 9 years – and I’m surprised to see I havn’t lost much in speed etc. I manage to do 20 km on a MTB in just over an hour and that’s with stopping and taking 99 photos too. Usually I average around 25 to 30km/hour which seems to be a pretty good speed to get in an urban setting on small back roads and paths.
I have one of these little bicycle computers but I find them a bit limiting, they are only really good for on the spot checks, no good for gauging improvement over time. So last night I took the GPS with and imported the data into OziExplorer which gives me much better view of what is going on. I can see average speeds between specific points of the route, elevation maps and with some add on tools even rate of climb/descent. I’ll store a track file for each time I go cycle and it should give me a good way to gauge if there are any improvement over time in my abilities.
The upshot of having the cycle is that I can get places at times that I wouldn’t have had the ability to get too before, last night for instance I got some great shots along the South Bank on the Thames Path.
For an idea of what OziExplorer gives me here is a screen shot of the track and also speed over distance. Click on it for a full size version.
