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!
