Garmin Problems on a Fast Day

This Ride: 21.8 miles (estimated)
Month: 547.7 miles
2011: 5,665.1 miles
Total since 1/1/2010: 11,784.8 miles

This morning I pulled the trunk off the Kona and reset my Garmin for this bike (after yesterday’s fixie ride) and from the beginning, the Garmin had trouble.  It kept automatically pausing when the speed sensor dropped unexpectedly to 0 mph (even though I was moving at 15-20 mph) and over the whole ride, measured a total of 5 miles with an average of just under 5 mph for one of the fastest rides I’ve ridden in the past month.  I’ll have to trouble shoot this before tomorrow’s ride.  A hard reset might be in order.

We had 13 riders out for a fast ride this morning.  With that many riders, it wasn’t too hard to keep up, sucking wheel most of the time, but I did take a short pull on the front once and rode solo during one stretch.  Some of us have joined Strava.com which is a social networking site for exercise.  It has the ability to allow setting of particular sections of the route on which you can compete by simply uploading your GPS file and it will automatically calculate speed and ranking among those who have ridden that segment before.  My goal this morning was to increase my speed and ranking on the section of Old County Rd that Dave P has mapped out, so while most of the riders turned into Round Bay, I motored on and hammered until I got to the segment end and then caught my breath.  Four other riders also rode this route, and three of us took turns on the lead down the trail to the turn around, beating the other riders who rode Askewton’s hill.  We found out later that they had shortened their route through Round Bay because of really hazardous roads near the water.  On the Strava segment, I increased my best speed by about 2 mph and am sitting just one second behind Dave P’s best time.  That was encouraging.

This might prove to be additional motivation to do some interval and hill training.

At least Strava correctly calculated this part of the ride from the GPS track!

The run back from the south end of the trail was also fast, as we all regrouped and rode a quick ride.  It felt really good.  I’m disappointed that the Garmin acted up, especially since I may have had a personal speed best on a morning ride this morning.  Oh well.

There is no map or link to the Garmin data today because of its corruption.