On Bicycles, and.... what else is there?

For running races of up to 4 hours, my Garmin Forerunner 610 has been my GPS of choice. It's compact, relatively light, fits well on my wrist, and has decent recording accuracy. I have a wrist strap for the Edge 500, but that unit is cumbersome for a wrist-mount. And my iPhone is too heavy. DCRainmaker image of Forerunner 610. See his review here . The issue with the Forerunner is it's very finicky. Here's what I did today during the Dolphin South End Runner's Club San Bruno Mountain "12 km" trail run (actually closer to 13 km, according to my GPS data). Turn on, acquiring GPS signal during warm-up run. Run with the GPS on, to record warm-up run. Finish warm-up run, then hit "stop" and "reset", to lock in the warm-up as a separate activity. Don't turn off the 610: intent is to keep GPS signal active so I'm ready to go at race start. Approximately 10 minutes later, with 10 seconds to go before race start, hit "start...

In the Woodside Ramble 50 km my Forerunner 610 was powered up and recording for almost exactly 5 hours before it powered down, 4:47 into the race and 32 minutes before my finish. This was, needless to say, a downer. The watch is rated for 8 hours, not 5. So what went wrong? Battery fatigue? False marketing? Accelerated draw due to a challenging GPS environment? A personal curse that I shall always get sucky batteries? Well, this last option has proven likely with various cell phone and laptop batteries in my personal history. But in this case, I stumbled across the simpler explanation when reviewing DCRainmaker's "in depth review" of the Forerunner 610 . One-second mode. I had the unit on one-second mode to give better time-resolution on Strava segments. I looked at the Smart Sampling mode for the Forerunner 610 here . Sampling times blew out to as long as 7 seconds in smart sampling mode (a few longer, but those intervals may be due to signal loss), while ...

I'm getting ready for the Devil Mountain Double, and it's a good time to review GPS options for the ride. Back before Strava, GPS was a bit of fluff for rides like this, but the social networking + power analysis + segment timing of Strava provides so much value I wouldn't consider skipping GPS today. The following are the strengths and weaknesses of the various GPS options available to me: Garmin Edge 500: Mine had the tabs snap off on me, so using it would require putting it in my jersey pocket. But I can borrow Cara's for the day. Battery life is likely adequate: it should last the double century if I start with a full charge. I will make sure auto-pause is on to limit battery consumption during rest stops (which will be minimal, but every bit counts). Smart sampling is unavailable due to the power meter (and I wouldn't use it anyway). It's light: only 58 grams without the mount, 66 grams with the mount. It's compact: mounted on my stem it won...

Previously I compared the Strava Android app on my HTC Incredible phone to the Garmin Forerunner 610 on a run I did along the Steven's Creek Trail. I thought the phone might have been slightly better, but it was close. This time I set off for a city ride without my phone, but I had the Garmin Edge 500 mounted with a strap to my right wrist, and I had the Garmin Forerunner 610 mounted to my left wrist with its integrated strap. I had both set to 1-second sampling. This wasn't a pure run, as I was also Christmas shopping (books for my nieces). So I stopped in several book stores along the way, as well as a two cellular phone shops (thinking of switching from Verizon to T-Mobile), one bike shop (the black-on-black Specialized SL4 with 2012 Red is very slick), and a chocolate shop (disappointed Girardelli's "sea salt" "Intense Dark" doesn't seem so dark at all from the fat:carbohydrate ratio). Anyway, all of these stops meant loss of signal. Here...

I recently did a run using both my new Garmin Forerunner 610 and the Strava Android app running on my HTC Incredible phone. I hadn't yet gone through the set-up menus on the Garmin so settings were still mostly default. This included "smart sampling" which reduces file sizes by recording data only when the watch decides it is important to do so based on the goal of being able to accurately reproduce the course. The Strava app takes a different approach to file size reduction: it attempts to sample at 3-second intervals unless data signal is lost or unless the runner is idle. It's thus less "smart". I've shown for cycling that "smart sampling" can yield significant errors in Strava times for segments since Strava doesn't interpolate positions and is therefore limited to times equal to a difference between samples. So if a 6-second gap, for example, appears in data Strava will have two choices for time on a segment, separated by 6 seco...

At the Low-Key Hillclimbs awards party this year, I received an extremely generous gift from some friends this Christmas: a Garmin Forerunner 610 . They had observed I'd been running with my Edge 500 coupled with a Garmin wrist strap, a functional if somewhat klunky solution to on-the-run GPS. In the rain at CIM it wasn't easy for me to see the Edge 500 screen: water droplets and low ambient light made for poor viewing conditions. So I decided early on to run blind: go on perceived exertion. This made sense to me in any case since, lacking any training data in the wet and windy conditions, I didn't know what my target pace should be anyway. So after getting a 5 km split, I allowed the Edge to flop upside down on my forearm where it was located (I had a gel under my compression sleeve which occupied the normal watch position). I left it there to collect data silently for post-run analysis (it was issuing beeps every 5 km, but during the constant rain of the run I didn...