Sunday, February 17, 2008

Cold start again

I'm not quite sure how, but I managed to get up early and go out on the bike for 40 miles today.

We were going to visit Jules' parents in Farnham, so I found a route via Cranleigh, Loxwood & Milford which made it a decent number of miles. I managed it in 2 1/2 hours which I was pleased with; especially as the hills were bigger than google maps had made apparent!

I learnt some more about my Garmin today. Basically the route was a new one, and since I was riding alone, I loaded the route into the Garmin so it could direct me. I know most of the route, except the bit between Milford and Farnham, where I was hoping to take a short-cut through Seale. However, I did not notice the error when I loaded the route into the Garmin which said "route truncated". It gave me directions all the way to Milford, and then said I had arrived at my destination. Great!! I managed to find my way ok, but ended up doing an extra 3 miles or so.

As an aside here, the Garmin is an excellent device. However the software it comes with is not so great. I have to back up my data every time I use it in order not to lose data for previous rides I've done. Also the mapping software it comes with is rubbish (at least in the uk). Pretty much only the A roads are available, and since most of my routes are B roads for training, you can't plan a route using it. I therefore use GoogleMaps to plan my route, get the url and add the option "&output=js" to the end, save the resulting web-page and then use some freeware called GPSBabel to translate the Google data into Garmin data.

Anyhow; enough moaning. I beat my personal best for mileage again this weekend. 110 miles.

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