Speed Season is here!!!
I’ve just got back from a windsurf session the estuary here at Ynyslas. Ivor, our local katabatic wind was up to his tricks so the wind was ballistic at over 40 knots. The water was a seething mass of white and simply getting out of your car on the beach led to an instant sand blasting.
My new speed kit isn’t here yet so I was forced to go out on wholly inappropriate kit. My board was far too big as was my fin and my sail was far too old. In fact, I didn’t notice this until I was at the water edge but the entire top panel was missing – not ideal. However, with temperatures at just above freezing it wasn’t really a day for messing around on the beach rigging different kit so I went out with the broken sail anyway.
It was hard work hanging on and keeping the board on the water was tough too. Not really perfect conditions for getting a top speed, but I stayed on the water for about an hour and had a few fast, but not very comfortable runs. My top speed was 32.85 knots. Way off my 40 knot target so I’m hoping my new kit will be easier to use as well as faster.
The tracks from my GPS drew some pretty lines though and you can see the speed channel I was ailing in pretty well from this.
My GPS Tracks from todays Speed Session
Garmin Forerunner 310XT
It isn’t available yet, but the new Garmin Foreunner 310Xt looks like an intersting bit of kit. I have a few GPS devices already and love my Garmin Foreunner 305, this just take it to another level, being more rugged and waterproof.
Finally, a GPS-enabled training device that isn’t afraid of the water. The rugged Forerunner 310XT is the triathlete’s indispensable training tool — a GPS-enabled, swim-proof trainer that tracks bike and run data and sends it wirelessly to your computer. This multi-sport device has up to 20 hours of battery life, tracks distance, pace and heart rate (optional), and goes from wrist to bike in seconds.
Could be good for swimming and windsurfing, as well as biking and other sports, and I may have to get my hands on one when it comes out. It seems to have most the features of the Forerunner 305, including the useful Virtual Training Partner. It is also slighter lighter, has a better battery life, is ANT power meter compatible, has wireless syncing capabilities and of course is properly waterproof. The Heart Rate Monitor appears to be an optional extra with this one though and it doesn’t appear to be able to store routes. This last omission seems a little od as the routes are used to allow the Virtual Training Partner to work , but otherwise it looks like a great piece of kit.
I’d planned to go for a ride on my own yesterday anbd as i’d been singing the praises of my Garmin Forerunner 305 and some of the features on it I thought I should put the Virtual Training Partner feature to the test.
I hadn’t used this particular feature before which allows you to record a particular course and then race yourself around the course next time you do it. Whilst doing so the Garmin Forerunner will tell you how far you have to go to the end, how far ahead or behind your time you are, as well as all of the normal readings such as speed, time, distance, heart rate etc etc.
I headed off to ClimachX with my Mountain Bike and started my first lap of the Trail. The weather was perfect, still quite cool as it was early in the morning, but gorgeously sunny. The trails were still wet though. I didn’t go too hard as I was intending to go around a second time, but I was feeling good and did keep up a nice steady pace that wasn’t too shabby. My first lap was completed in a time of 58 mins 22 seconds, which isn’t bad for me and probably only the second time I’ve been under the hour (My best ever until this point was 56 mins 58 seconds).
I had rest in the car park for a while which gave me time to save the route I’d just done as a ‘Course’ which I could then use to compare against my next attempt at the trail. I got chatting to Ian as well and we decided to head off around the course again. I pressed the ‘Do Course’ button and off we went.
I’m never too good at getting going again once I’ve stopped and halfway up the first climb my Garmin was showing me that I was 100 feet behind my previous attempt. By the time I’d got to the top of the hill though I was 100 feet ahead and that’s when the challenge started. It’s really good, because once you’re ahead you just don’t want to drop back behind your virtual training partner so it provides a really good incentive to keep pushing a little harder. I was winning so there was no time to stop!
After the first two bits of singletrack I was up to around 300 feet ahead, and then by the halfway point I was around 0.15 miles ahead. My legs were beginning to feel it now though but I only had 4 miles or so left to go so had to keep pushing on. Just before the last singletrack climb I was just over .3 miles ahead, but this dropped back down to about 0.15 miles ahead at the top of the final descent. Only one thing for it, I was going to have to go for it on the descent. It worked, at the bottom I was still ahead and I even went hard down the last bit of fire0road and into the car park.
Stopped the watch and I’d beaten my Virtual Training Partner by 0.45 miles.. I was the winner! My actual time was 56 mins 17 seconds as well which was a record for me.
All in all it is a great training feature. I need to tweak what I can see on the screen at a glance as I’d like to be able to see the distance to the end, the time that I’m ahead or behind, my heart rate and total time but the screens are customisable so that should be easy to do. I also don’t think I’d use it if I was dropping too far behind myself. It’s all well and good to use it as a tool to motivate yourself, but if you’re having a bad day and are being beaten by your virtual training partner then it will only make you feel worse. At least, that’s the case for me. Other people well well find the opposite is true but I tend to try harder when I’m going well and just give up a bit if I’ve no chance of winning! Probably not quite the right attitude but its just the way I am.
If you have Garmin Forerunner or one of their other devices with a Virtual Training Partner feature, give it a go.
I had a tough day at the office yesterday… Started work at 4am and worked until 10.30am, stopping to help get Morgan off to nursery and Anna off to work, then the fun began. A good windsurf session off the beach here at Ynyslas. The windsurfing itself was good, lots of wind and some decent waves, and then the weather got interetsing too. First the sky went very dark indeed and we were surrounded by thunder and lightning (I got off the water as a 4m carbon mast is likely to attract the lightning and I don’t fancy finding out what happens if it hits it whilst I’m attached!), then some really strange looking dark clouds swriled overhead and we were hit by a massive hailstorm, then the wind dropped off, so I packed up and headed home.
As soon as I got home the sun came out and the wind picked up again – typical. A little more work, collected Morgan from nursery and went to watch the cranes at the estuary where they are doing some directional drilling to install a new electricity link beneath the estuary.. I’m not 100% sure what the cable is for and if it will affect our electricity supply, but we’ve been having more than our fair share of power cuts again recently (common at this time of year), so some improvement wouldn’t go amiss.
I then psyched myself up to brave the weather and go out for a night ride on my mountain bike. Only a short one, but it was good to do it. I won’t bore you with the stats from my GPS Heart Rate Monitor again, but as with every training session I’ve used it for so far, my maximum heart rate was 172bpm again!
Just for James (as he requested it in his comment), here are the summary stats:
Seeing as James asked for a daily updates as far as my attempts to get fit are concerned, here are the stats from my Mountain Bike Ride around the Pendam Trail at Nant-yr-Arian today.
First the route itself, My Speed and Heart Rate graph… Max 172bpm once again! And the summary stats.
After the first lap I then did another lap of the most northerly loop, and on the way checked in on a couple of my geocaches to make sure they were OK. Both caches were fine, but the tree hiding the cache at Blaenmelindwr has been felled and a few people have had problems with the coordinates for the cache at Syfydrin, so I took some new readings with my Forerunner 305 which has a better GPS receiver than my old eTrex.
I was impressed with the performance of the Foreunner, as it seemed to keep GPS reception even through the forested parts of the trail and looking at the route in Google Earth, the trail made by the second lap was perfectly on top of the first time around so accuracy seems to be good… Shame my fitness isn’t quite up to the same standards!
I seem to be becoming GPS enabled in all walks of life these days. It started with a Garmin eTrex that I originally bought to see how fast I could go whilst windsurfing and then started using for geocaching.
I had a TomTom One XL for my birthday which has been working well and is good fun in the car and now I’ve recently ordered a Garmin Forerunner 305.
Well, as usual at this time of year loads of people decide it is time to get fit and shed some of that Xmas excess, and I’m one of them so I have started running and mountain-biking in an attempt to regain some of my fitness. I thought if I splashed out on a GPS enabled heart-rate monitor to track my progress then I would have to keep at it in order to justify the expense.
It hasn’t arrived yet, but I shall write a little report on it here when I’ve had chance to try it out.
The prices of GPS enabled devices is dropping all the time, already the One XL that I got just a month ago has dropped in price by about 20%. Kind of annoying, but I guess I’ve had a months use out of it and technological gadgets always drop in price pretty quickly. Next on the list of GPS enabled devices will be a handheld with mapping capabilities… Maybe not or a while though!
