Biking Chronicles Issue No. 1
Since acquiring the bike last week, I have accumulated a whopping 22 miles on the bike spanned across 4 days! It’s almost embarrassing, but in my defense, I’m just trying to get acquainted with my new bike, and my butt hurts after 20 minutes or so, and I realized that I’m not too familiar with my neighborhood. Though I’m a bit proud to say that the short trips are not due to getting tired easily; I started running last fall, and I’m pretty sure that helped a lot with my stamina.
In addition to the new bike, I probably already spent half of my retirement savings on a slew of accessories and clothing ($30 for a pair of shorts?!), and one of those accessories is the Garmin Edge 205 GPS-enabled bicycle computer (as recommended by Densio).
The nice thing about this bike computer compared to the cheaper ones out there is the lack of wires to measure your speed–it is all done through its built-in SIRF GPS chip (think of it as a GPS without the mapping capabilities). Downside is the lack of ability to measure cadence (for more accurate measurement of calories burned) and barometric (read: more accurate than GPS-enabled) altimeter (found in its higher-end sibling, the Edge 305), but those features I can probably live without.
The 205 made it so easy to track my biking activity, and it provides some level of drive to do more biking, since you can keep tabs on your progress with relative ease. The device, however, has its shares of nits:
I learned over the past few days, that there probably at least 50 file types out there that’s used for routes and tracks, and Garmin has probably about ten. There is a standard file format called the GPX format whose intention is to have these GPS devices will be able to talk to each other via this “translator format.” I started playing around with editing/uploading training courses (as in bike routes) and the GPS MAc software that came with the device doesn’t directly support the GPX format for uploading, it only supports Garmin’s own .TCX (older) format for tracks/routes. There is a tool out there called GPX2CRS that converts the GPX to Garmin’s “other” track/route file format, the newer CRS format. To convert from CRS to TCX, I needed to go to GPSies.com…AAAAaarggghhh!!!
Forget about those confusing file formats for a second…there’s also one other thing I’ve learned is that all of these formats share the same property: they’re all XML formats! By eyeballing the CRS and TCX formats, it seems that running the file through a simple XSLT would do the trick…
Um…sorry I think I just lost you on that previous sentence, eh?
Yes, I’ve tried GPSBabel and I don’t think it natively supports the TCX and CRS formats…or does it? I’ll probably need to do further reading on this…there has to be something out there already that converts GPX to TCX for uploading to the Garmin 205…
I also started uploading my bike activities to AllSportGPS.com. It’s free (compared to that crappy Garmin MotionBased website) and it’s route/track editing is MUCH better than the overrated SportTracks software.
That’s probably too much rant about biking for one day.
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