Bike Gadgets....

[Dianyla]

After a year of gearlust I finally caved and snapped up a used Polar S720i on eBay for a reasonable price. And by reasonable, I mean I paid $250 for the watch, speed unit, and cadence sensor. Full retail is around $300 for the watch plus another $60 for the cadence sensor.

"But honey, look how much money I saved!"

I've finally figured out how to operate the equipment, which was a little bit of a learning curve. I really like coming home from a ride and loading the data into my computer to figure out "what went wrong!" And I'd have to say one of my favorite things is the calories burned estimate which is really helping me get an idea of how much I need to eat to fuel my riding. The other night I bonked halfway through my commute home and it was quite obvious. You can literally see on the graph where my heartrate just fell and couldn't get back up again.

Now I'm just trying to work out the details of how to actually train using the HRM. There are some interesting books on amazon about heart rate training, anybody have a recommendation?


ETA: For plotting routes, I like to use http://www.gmap-pedometer.com