Weather's Getting Warmer

After all of the bad weather we have had for the past couple days everything from snow to rain as well as wind and it just being plain cold the weather is finally getting much nicer again as it should be for spring.

Last night I was able to mow the lawn, front and back, and wear shorts while doing so. Unfortunately I still had to wear a sweatshirt because once the sun dipped down below the mountains and the evening breeze kicked up it started to get cold again, although manageable.

Half Moon Bay

This morning I managed to get on the trainer and do a solid 12 miles. I took last night off because once I was finished mowing the lawns, cleaning up and putting everything away it was pushing 9:00 and I was getting hungry, had a decent workout already and walked well over 10,500 steps.

So even though the distance this morning was less than I would normally do, the route I cycled immediately starts out with several miles of uphill, then a nice downhill to let your legs recover a little bit, not enough because it goes by way too fast. The next thing you know, you're back into another uphill, although much less of a incline than the first.

The first one starts out at an aggressive 3.4% and quickly climbs up to it's maximum of 8.1% which kicks the crap out of my legs first thing in the morning and first thing on the bike. In reality I should probably run a quick warm up before doing this route to avoid knee injury. Once that is passed and the downhill reward has been enjoyed it's time for the second big climb of the route. This one is more steady and gradually goes from 2% up to 5.4% I think for a few miles, topping off with a few kickers that increase the climb for just long enough to bring the burn back.

Once those are passed the rest of the route is mostly flat, or at a 1.2% incline. Again, not much, yet enough to feel it and to remind you that you cannot stop pedaling or you will quickly come to a standstill. I think I broke my cadence two, maybe three times to stretch and flex my leg muscles. Otherwise I was non-stop for the reminder of the ride. Towards the end there are a few little kickers as well as one right at the end that you can get through fairly fast.

The end, with approximately 3/4 a mile to go, give or take a few tenths, is a downhill run which is a great way to finish the spin. I have done this route a few times and every time I forget how difficult the start can be. I think this may be the only time that I have done it at 100% effort though? I honestly don't remember. Many of the routes on this particular training software are a little 'off' in my opinion. The amount of effort is much greater than what is shown on the screen.

I am very familiar with the various climbs as the other software that I am beta testing hits every elevation from 0.1% up to or just under 10%. In this trainer application, the values feel 20-40% more difficult if I had to put a percentage to the intensity factor. Plus, the person that creates the route has the ability to tweak it to their liking.

This means they can have erratic data so the trainer can only interpret it so good, resulting in an overly difficult or east route, potentially. The routes that I have mapped out using their software (an entire topic on it's own as its clunky, slow and annoying to say the least), only one actually, took a bit of work to smooth it out to increase the accuracy and I doubt that most do that. Plus as mentioned I created mine off of a map and routed it out that way.

Others import the data from their ride which could be from a phone, cheap GPS and so on. If I use my Garmin 1000 GPS the data is near perfect, turns and all. Most of the lesser models as well as phone GPS data ends up with cut corners, hard turns and so on when you dive in and inspect the route vs. the actual road it follows.

Maybe It's Intentional

At the same time, they may intentionally make, for example, a 5.0% grade on the route require the input of something greater. This way they are training to out perform the actual route when they are out there again in the future. Not a bad idea at all if you are the one that created it and know what to set it at to be more accurate. For everyone else we are stuck assuming it's accurate.

Unfortunately I have found this to be the case with this software more times than not and one reason I don't use it very often compared to the other software that I use for training. If I have to scale the percentage of intensity back by 40 to 50% at times, I have no idea if I'm wasting my time. Let me rephrase, I would never be literally "wasting my time" as all time on the bike is good unless you are training for something specific. Although I would prefer it to be more accurate.

Crappy Search Feature(s)

Another issue is finding a route. This can prove to be very time consuming, cumbersome and annoying with this particular software. At times you FINALLY find something of interest and intensity and whatta you know, they labeled it wrong or did not take the time to clean up the elevation or map data as they should have. So a route that should have been 21 miles with less than 1k of elevation once complete and a maximum incline of 4% ends up being something 5x more intense than that and the only thing that was accurate was the mileage.

Anyway, enough about that, it was a nice ride although the intensity was almost certainly off and not the amount that I was looking for today because I am trying to ride the next two days outside and do not want my legs to be spent. Yet again, more first world problems, I understand that completely. I simply feel that people need to take more pride in the routes they upload or there needs to be something in place where the company reviews the data based off of map software and related.

There is a lot of software out there for training and so far the one that I have used the most and believe has the most accurate data is Zwift. I am on the beta for it and they have some great software, an iOS companion application and more. Even if I was not part of the beta I would have very strong opinions about it, yes even untested and based on the reviews and demos I have seen.

From what I have heard, the price will not be too bad either once it pops out of the beta program and into the wild. I for one will continue to use it and become a subscriber for sure! Well unless it ends up being crazy expensive, although I doubt it, I am confident they will be on par or slightly less than most other software out there, with 4x the features, community and support.

The only hope that I have is they open up other routes to ride. Even now it can get a little tedious doing laps on the island over and over. Each lap is something like 3.3 miles +/- and you start to know where things are at obviously. This is good and bad; good if you are trying to get a personal best or king of the mountain on a segment, bad if you want to just get through a few more miles and know there is a big climbing coming up that you will have to pass to do so. Otherwise zero complaints here, and they have already flipped the course one time so you cycled the opposite direction, that was fun!

Then on Christmas they changed the blimp to Santa and reindeer flying around the course which was a lot of fun to see happen. The course does go from day to night as well, there are wildlife on the side of the road, well one deer so far is all I have seen. During April Fools they changed the bikes that everyone rides to Big Wheels which again was friggin' funny and awesome!

I hope they are around for the long haul. I know there is one other competitor out there that has a 3D system and I have tried their software as well. It crashed on me the first time after I had completed a bunch of miles so I was left with zero data for my time and effort. Not a big deal, I'm in it for the exercise and fun, although I enjoy the data just as much to reflect back on my ride and performance.

This competitor seems to be setup in a manner that you have to sign-up for events. I think that is lame, I don't want to sign-up ahead of time to ride a course. When I want to ride I want to jump on the bike and go no matter the time of day or night! Maybe that works better for some cyclist, it's not something I am interested in.

Alright that is about all that I have time to write about today - actually turned out a lot longer than I planned for it to be. Today was supposed to be a short and sweet entry as I am getting a little burned out on finding the time to write a daily - it's friggin' hard! I have considered stopping once I hit 1,000 entries so we will see how that goes. I think this one is number 912 so I am still a long way away from hitting 1,000. Maybe at that time I will just scale it back as I had intended to from the start when I put up the very first post.

A photo and maybe a paragraph, guess we will see! Plus I will be doing Zoey's blog every day as well - one more thing to the to-do list, thankfully enjoyable for the most part. The pressure of remembering is what gets to me at times. Anyway, as promised, goodbye for now!

Photo: I did not have a photo for today so I am using one that I snapped of a newspaper in the break room at work. Not the most exciting thing to look at, it gets the job done!