Rochester Bicycling & Garmin Edge Workouts
Bicycling in Rochester should be awesome. But I think it's not. Really, it could use improvement.
This weekend, it was still warmer than usual, and I wanted to get out and ride. I'm attempting to follow some sort of magic periodization plan that a leprechaun wrote down on a magic soiled chamois. So this week (and the next couple of weeks) I'll be working on mainly base building. Not the traditional base building of 4 hour, low intensity rides everyday for 8 weeks. What I'm doing is a little more modified, placing a set amount of time in each training zone.
So Saturday morning I wanted to get in about an hour at Zone 2 (60-70% of heart rate reserve). Using the new toy, mounted on the commuter bike, I figured I could toodle around on the city bike paths.
I choose to do a route that was about 12 miles. Not far but, I figured if I needed more distance, I could just ride some other trails or roads to make up the time. Here's a map of the route taken from the toy.
Now, I'm toodling along. I approach the 16th Street SE underpass, and what do i see? Well I guess they don't clear the path past that point. Well I continue on riding over the hard, snow, ice, bumpy mix of crappy bike path. Of course attempting to ride this terrain on the 700x35c hybrid tires, with a fixed gear at 42x16 ratio brings my heart rate mostly into Zone 3, just to keep moving foward. Oh well, when I reach the end of the path, I decide to jump on the road to get back to the point on the trail where it's plowed.
My point is that they should consider plowing all the paths in town. I specifically choose to ride the paths, insted of the road, because I wanted to go at an easy pace away from traffic. Had I been interested in doing more intensity and speed, I would have ridden on the road. But now I'll have to consider using the roads for even these type of rides.
Now that you know that I think the city should plow all the bike paths just so I can ride them intermittently, I'll proceed on to complain about the Garmin Edge's workout feature. The workout function is accessed after turnung on the unit, allowing it to sync up to the satalittes, then hitting mode to get to the main menu, selecting training, then selecting workouts, then advanced, and then the workout you want to do. These are workouts that came stock, or were uploaded/created using the Garmin Training Center software that comes with the unit.
I choose a workout I created consisting of 10 minutes at Zone 1, then 50 minutes at Zone 2, and finishing at 10 minutes at Zone 1 again. Simple. Warm-up, workout, and cool-down. So you choose the workout and press "Enter." The screen pops up with the choice to do, edit or delete the workout. Choose do and press enter. The workout screen shows up, but doesn't actually start the workout till you pressthe start/stop button.
That's cool. Once going it alerts you if you're going to hard and the countdown timer shows how long (or how far) to the next workout change. Neat. The alert tones could be louder, as portions of the trail are close to busy roads and I could barely hear the unit bleeping at me when I was overworking.
The main complaint I have is at the end of the workout. Unless I'm wrong, the recording timer just stops when the workout is done. I still had a couple of miles to go before I got home, when the workout had finished. I scrolled to the bike computer screen and noticed that the timer wasn't going so I hit start/stop to get it going again. Not hard, but aggrivating. And I may not have noticed till I had gotten home, and would be missing the last couple of miles of my ride in my training log.
I'll have to play with the workout feature somemore, maybe doing intervals and sprints to really decide if the feature is of any value or not. And to double check that the timer stops when the workout stops, and if so that's pretty irritating.
Oh, here's a graph of the workout:
you can see where my heart rate spikes up from below Zone 1, to Zone 2. Then again when I reached the unplowed portion of the bike trail.
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Monday 01/14/2008 | 10:36 am
Brian on Tuesday 01/15/2008 | 03:37 pm
No matter where you live in Rochester, after 10 minutes of riding you can be on county roads. I was out on Sunday and had a good ride on plowed roads, tooling along on my fixed gear at an effort of my choosing.
On county roads no cars care how fast you are going. They are doing 55-65, so whether you are doing 10 or 20 MPH doesn't matter a whit to them. Either way you are just a blur.
Gunnar on Tuesday 01/15/2008 | 04:46 pm
You have a point there. I don't really know why I feel safer riding slow away from traffic, and riding fast with or near traffic.
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