Legs of lead and a head full of poop

Here's hoping this attempt of mine to embed a wee map (from MapMyRide) works. At least I think that's embedding. I'd recommend clicking the view elevation button (scroll down the map) to see what my forthcoming snoozefest is about.

It's a snippet of a few miles cycling I did yesterday (along with other unmapped miles) which showed me to be the weakling I always suspected.

I am, however, a stubborn weakling as I refused to walk. I'd be lying to say I found it anything short of tough going but I twiddled up at a crawl in my tiny 30 front 29 rear gearing and eventually made it to the top. Sometimes I even threw it into a high gear like a 30/26 or 30/23 (for about ten feet at a time). I'm a regular Bert Grabsch with that kind of gearing.

That climb was probably no big whoop for most cycling types but, while pedalling up the 16% section into the strong headwind and looking at the black cloud on the mountain top, I kept thinking 'What kind of moron does this to himself?'. Needless to say, that was replaced with 'Yay! I feel brilliant for having done that' immediately upon reaching the summit.

Something I made an error of during my cycle was taking on too much caffeine. After caffeine infused gels, tablets in my juice (including accidentally dropping two into a bottle when it should have been one alone) and meeting my lovely lady for a couple of coffees (which she bought for me) on the way home, my stomach was not particularly grateful. I'm surprised my bowels didn't register a complaint too. Remarkably (and thankfully) they behaved themselves very well. Had they not, I dread to think of the consequences.

My GPS was annoying the boobies off me yesterday. It kept telling me I wasn't moving when I knew (albeit slowly) I was. It was behaving particularly badly about half way up my mountain (listen up belittling grumblers, it does officially count as a mountain) climb, bleeping constantly and being a regular pain in the bum. Eventually I had to switch the speed/cadence sensor off and let it get my pace from the GPS itself. I hope it turns out to be nothing more sinister than a battery in need of replacing. I'm sure a replacement unit is about forty pounds or more.

Has anyone been watching the UCI World Championships in Denmark? I'd say the chaps and lasses involved in that might be able to make it up my (to them) little bump of a climb yesterday hardly having broken sweat. They seem almost superhuman.

As you'll know if you're a regular here, I've been bitten by the cycle jersey buying bug of late. The other day I added to my recent addiction and got another Foska jersey. This time it was a black I Pay Road Tax jersey. What I didn't realise at the time is that it refers to the website www.IPayRoadTax.com. In my ignorance, I thought it was making referece to the majority of people on bicycles also owning cars and paying road tax. More fool me. As their website points out, I don't pay road tax at all. I pay vehicle tax. Here it is (copied and pasted) from the I Pay Road Tax website:

Road tax was abolished 74 years ago. Road tax doesn't exist. It's car tax, a tax on cars and other vehicles, not a tax on roads or a fee to use them. Motorists do not pay directly for the roads. Roads are paid for via general and local taxation. In 1926, Winston Churchill started the process to abolish road tax. It was finally culled in 1937. The ironically-named iPayRoadTax.com helps spread this message on cycle jerseys. Car tax is based on amount of CO2 emitted so, if a fee had to be paid, cyclists would pay the same as 'tax-dodgers' such as disabled drivers, police officers, the Royal family, and band A motorists, ie £0. Most cyclists are also car-owners, too, so pay VED. Many of those who believe road tax exists, want cyclists off the roads or, at least registered, but bicycle licensing is an expensive folly.

Like a lot of such websites, it appears the contributor(s) can be a bit vitriolic gut reaction at times but it generally seems fairly decent. They're also prone to taking ridiculous internet comments (which were presumably made in some pathetic attempt at humour by unfunny and unintelligent people) as if they're meant literally. I don't think that kind of action helps their cause much but they've got some good stuff to say in there too.

The point about people paying tax on their vehicles as opposed to paying directly for the road is a fair one and worth making. It is a bit of a tired cliche to hear people grumble about cyclists not paying road tax. Turns out we all don't, including those who drive Volvos.

While looking up the Foska website I noticed they sell novelty pasta. It's a bit expensive for my tastes but I still like it. I'm afraid it's much the same story when it comes to the prices of the coffee etc. at Big Maggy's online shop too. I'm a tightwad.

Thoughts of a mildly uninteresting kind

While partaking in the loathsome boredom of grass cutting, my mind often wanders from the matter in hand and onto more interesting (subjectively) topics. Such was the case today as I was thinking about, among other things, cycling. Who could have guessed?

One thought which entered my head was how windy it was while I was partaking in the grass shortening exercise. That reminded me of my recent change in cycling attire. When it is (what passes for) summer I'd normally wear my bib-shorts with a short sleeved jersey directly over them. Earlier this year, however, I had a bit of a chest problem and was 'laid up' for about two months. This seemed to happen very soon after a cycle. I wondered if the two were related. I still don't know if they were linked but it led to my buying a couple of Craft sleeveless base layers. I haven't had any chest problems since.

Although it seems counter-intuative to wear another layer on a hot day (not that we get a surplus of such here) I've found it beneficial to have a thin base layer on. In my ignorance I feared I might overheat but that hasn't been the case at all. I suppose, if the professionals wear base layers in hot conditions, putting out the effort they do, there almost has to be something in it and the chances of my getting too hot here, at my low speeds, are fairly minimal.

Another topic which popped (or pooped) into my mind was my GPS. I'm continually fascinated by having a GPS on a bicycle. I know it's not especially new technology now but I'm easily impressed and, to me, it's quite the wonder.

I was pleased to discover a simple way to export routes from MapMyRide onto my Edge 800. I had been plotting a course on MapMyRide, exporting it as a '.gpx' file (for some reason it no longer exports directly in the '.crs' format) and then going to GPSies to convert that over to a '.crs' file and uploading that into Garmin Training Centre so I could then upload the course into my Edge. That was all a bit 'clunky' and pointlessly time consuming. Thanks to typing some query I can't remember into Google and clicking on a random website, I now know an easier (and probably obvious to most) way to put courses on my Edge.

All I have to do is save off the '.gpx' file from MapMyRide and copy & paste it into the 'Garmin > New files' folder on the Edge. As if by magic, the GPS does the rest and realises it's a route. It doesn't seem to show elevation in the route but that's only a small downside. For me it's more important to be able to use it for navigation.

As an example of how MapMyRide works, here's a route I just mapped:


On the topic of the Edge 800 and elevation, that's still being a bit of a pain in the bum. A few times now it has got my initial elevation completely wrong. Sometimes it starts me off a couple of hundred (or more) feet below my actual elevation. It keeps count correctly during the cycle but everything is a couple of hundred feet low. It works sometimes and doesn't others. I just need to remember to check and manually set the elevation (which is simple to do in one of the device's menus) if it does go wrong. Sadly, I'm forgetful.

MapMyRide

I'm very impressed with MapMyRide.com. For starters, I obviously like the fact it's free as I'm a cheapskate but that's not the be all and end all. I've used a few different free GPS course creators and MapMyRide.com seems far and away the best. The map coverage is very good of the area I live in and contains most of the fiddly little roads I like to cycle on but not every map shows. As you can imagine, that's a real pain with a lot of them. I would be plotting routes out for my GPS unit and find they kind of disappeared part of the way through and I had to guess where some roads were. It didn't make for accurate mapping.

Something else I really really really like about MapMyRide.com is the ability to set it to follow the roads between points. I'm probably not explaining this well but basically it means I can put down a two consecutive points along a road and the software is smart enough to draw the squiggly line in between, along which the path of the road actually goes. In the past, I found myself having to draw dozens and dozens of points to follow the shape of the road but thankfully that's a thing of the past. I can even put points a couple of roads apart and MapMyRide.com seems smart enough to usually grasp the way I want to go. This means it takes, I estimate, less than a quarter of the time it used to for me to map out cycle routes. It's also more enjoyable than merely 'clicking' hundreds of waypoints down. Hopefully it will save me from all the 'Off route' messages I kept getting with my self-done waypoints, especially once I got lazy and bored towards the end of a route.

Another bonus worthy of mention is that MapMyRide.com lets one export a copy of the route as a 'CRS' file. As I've got a Garmin Edge GPS unit, that's very handy. The software (Called 'Training Center') their Edge units use doesn't work well with a number of standard GPS formats ('GPX' files, for example). You can get it to work but it means downloading other software to convert the files over so Training Centre understands it. Thankfully, with MapMyRide.com, this is not a problem. It exports the files in a manner Training Centre and my Edge both understand. I know this doesn't sound like much but it makes things so much easier than pissing about with different file types and attempting (Often failing through my ineptitude) to convert them. By the way, if you do need to convert files for your GPS unit, I recommend looking at this topic here, even if it gets a bit much and might send you to sleep. You can probably find most of what you want to know if the first couple of posts.

Anyway, another little mention MapMyRide.com deserves is for letting you print out a list of the directions on the route you've created. This is marvellous. I used to spend ages writing out big lists of 'TL at TJ, SO at XR etc. etc' and now I shouldn't have to as MapMyRide.com automatically does that when you 'map your ride'. How wonderful! The two pains in the arse for me in devising a route have been covered by MapMyRide.com. No longer will I have to clickety-clickety-click a little series of waypoints vaguely following the contours of a road and no longer will I waste time away writing directions for the cycle I'm planning on. What a super piece of free software it is. I hope it continues to be free and as good as it seems.