Tag Archives: strava

Quintana is wrong about riding on sensations / I’m blind without heart rate & power

Left & right-top, what it's like to ride "dark." Lower right, with instruments. I experienced both today.
Left & right-top, what it’s like to ride “dark.” Lower right, with instruments. I experienced both today; definitely prefer w/instruments!
No epic ride today; I took advantage of the day off to ride down to our Los Altos store and get some work done on their computers. What I didn’t expect was to find my Garmin had somehow self-discharged during the night, so I got about a quarter mile from home and my screen went dark!

My first thought was ohmygosh, if the ride’s not on Strava, it didn’t happen. And what sort of calamity might come to someone beginning something while knowing it made not even a butterfly change course? Do I go home and delay the ride until my Garmin charges? Do I snag Kevin’s Garmin and try to figure out how to make the ride download as my own? Nope. Because I’ve got the Strava app on my phone! So I spend a couple minutes syncing my power, speed and heartrate sensors to the iPhone, push the start button, put the phone in my pocket and I’m off. But the world is definitely NOT in order. The picture above tells the story.

Do I ride for fun? Yes. Do I enjoy once in a while taking it easy? So what does it matter if I don’t have screens giving me my speed, heart rate and power levels? Apparently, it matters a lot.

Riding through Woodside, Portola Valley and the Los Altos Hills, with a blank computer screen, I felt a bit lost. I knew the information was being recorded so it wasn’t as if the ride itself wasn’t happening, but I wasn’t happening. I felt a bit sluggish. Lacking in motivation. Something about not knowing how hard I was actually going, no targets or reference points, was holding me back. I tried to use other cyclists as reference points, and that helped a bit, but frankly, and ironically, it wasn’t much fun. That’s the strange thing about it… the assumption is that paying attention to heart rate & power & speed takes away from the pure enjoyment of cycling. I can see where that might be the case for some. Maybe even many. But not for me.

Arriving in Los Altos I set to work doing some long-neglected maintenance on their computers and forgot, until almost too late, to plug in my Garmin. I managed to get it up to a 12% charge, so about 1/4 of the way back, I turned it on and hoped that it would stay with me for a while. During that time I got back to that familiar feeling of knowing what I was doing and what I could be doing, which provides the motivation to push that much harder. I’m certain that, without all that data and encouragement coming from my bike’s digital dashboard, I wouldn’t have gotten a PR for the climb up Sand Hill.

No way around it, I’m addicted to my gadgets and the type of cycling they offer me. It keeps me in the game. Strava by itself is a great diary of your cycling history, and does a great job of showing your relative fitness (not to mention your gradual decline as you get older). But cycling with heart rate, power & speed right in front of you? That takes it to a whole new level.

I could never go back to the way it was, and I remember those days all too well. Stockton Time Trial, 1972 I think? 25 miles, and all I had was a stopwatch on my handlebars and mileage markers on the road. No heart monitor to tell me I was pushing too hard, too soon. No power meter to help optimize speed vs effort by changing position. No speed telling me… just that. It was agony. I survived, 2nd place even, but suffering with gadgets is a lot more fun than suffering without. For me, anyway.

Oh, the reference to Quintana? The guy who’s leading the Vuelta at the moment? The other day he said that racing would be better if power meters were banned and riders used their “sensations” to guide their efforts. I’m not buying it. Power meters may be a very small part of the reason, since they let someone know, in real time, how many matches they’re actually burning. But I think they also provide motivation and encouragement, when you know you’ve done better in the past, you know there’s a number you should be able to hit. I think, and maybe it’s wishful thinking, that there’s been a general reduction in doping so the playing field is more level than a few years ago, when doping was rampant and some riders were “super responders” who reaction more strongly to the drugs used for enhancing performance than others. Like I said, wishful thinking. –Mike–

Mount Hamilton the hard way / don’t trust Strava to create a route


It should have been a pretty straightforward ride to Mount Hamilton. Normally, Kevin and I take the train down to San Jose, and ride from the station up to the top, and back. About 50 miles round-trip. But today I decided to make it a bit tougher, riding all the way from Redwood City instead of taking the train (but on the return, catching the train in San Jose).

Of course, back in the day, my friends and I would do the complete round-trip by bike, just over 100 miles. I wasn’t ready for quite that much punishment and, besides, the roads were a lot easier to navigate back then (less traffic on city streets). Riding one-way there, train back, seemed like a reasonable compromise. But… how to get there? I considered just mapping it out in a straight-forward fashion, heading south on Foothill, then Stevens Creek into San Jose, pretty much what I did 44 years ago. Not much fun, right? So I tried Strava’s route creation feature, thinking I should take advantage of the various bike trails and paths. With a bit of mucking around, I had a route that, I thought, made sense.

One of several gravel trails Strava's routing software put us onto. We opted out of any further gravel excursions.
One of several gravel trails Strava’s routing software put us onto. We opted out of any further gravel excursions.

And it did make sense, until it routed us, more than once, onto gravel trails. Fine for a hybrid, not so great for a roadbike with light tires. Thankfully it wasn’t too tough to figure out how to route around the gravel trails, but it added quite a bit of time to the ride.

Surprisingly, despite the extra miles and stress getting to Mount Hamilton, we felt pretty good getting up it. A fantastic little Vietnamese coffee/sandwich shop we found probably helped in that regard.

There was some drama; either we timed things just right or way-wrong as we raced to the train station and had, literally, 90 seconds to spare. Just one more red light and we wouldn’t have made it, causing us to wait another hour for next train. Not fun fumbling with the ticket machine, trying to make sure we got that right, knowing the train was just about to pull out!

How tired was Kevin? Tired enough to put the wrong glove on the right hand!
How tired was Kevin? Tired enough to put the wrong glove on the right hand!

Overall, about 82 miles for the day. Kevin’s really tired; I’m ready for more! Unfortunately, “more” will have to wait for a few days, as I travel to the bike industry’s trade show tomorrow and miss both Tuesday & Thursday-morning’s rides. Hate that. Hopefully there will be cool stuff to see and bring in for customers though. –MikeJ