the last update on the Garmin

The cadence sensor on the new bike computer is now working fine, thanks to the folks at Bike Barn Champions. I took it there Friday night, and Jason had it working for me in about 10 minutes. Apparently, it's not enough to just scan for the sensor, you also have to specify in one of your display profiles that you actually want to see cadence. Um, okay. That may have been a good thing to include in the manual, Garmin. :)

I rode with it for the first time Saturday...took me a while to get used to all the displayed fields. I'm not sure that I'll want all of them up all the time like that...it was a bit of information overload, and one of the values I really wanted to see (HR) wasn't on the default display. I was able to fix that yesterday, though, so that the 8(!) displayed fields were the ones most useful to me (cadence, speed, HR, total time, distance, time of day, heading, and % grade). Still might be a bit of overload, but I couldn't decide which of those to leave off in order to go to a smaller number of displayed fields. Heading and grade I could probably do without, but now that I've got them, I kind of want to play with them a bit.

The GPS seems to be pretty accurate. My cateye (when it was working) used to measure my Saturday ride at 22.6ish miles, as did the GMap Pedometer. Routeslip has it at 21.97, but that's with a bit of guessing, since part of the loop is a road not yet known to google maps. The Edge says it's 22.14, which is right in that margin of error...especially since I forgot to press the Start button until I was a couple blocks into the ride.

The best feature, by far, is the ability to upload my workout data to the computer. First, I tried the software that came with the device (Training Center), which was pretty decent. It made me a map (oooh, pretty!), told me all the stats I wanted. It also had accurate HR measurements, so apparently the chest strap was recording even though it was not on the display.

One thing that I don't particularly like about the PC software is that it graphs everything according to zones. The app tells me how much time I spent in zone 1-5 in speed and HR, but doesn't display any reminders of what those zones actually are. And it also displays speed as minutes/mile by default, when I'd much rather see mph. It looks like that is toggled by a profile setting which I've reset a couple times now, but I have yet to make it stick.

Motionbased.com was much cooler. The upload process was a little more involved (2 steps instead of one, heh), but their data format was much easier for me to understand. I also liked that it brings in weather conditions as well, and that it showed the moving average speed (15.5 mph) on the summary in addition to the total average (11.7 mph). The PC software only showed the total average, which made me a little sad...the moving average is better for my ego. :P

In looking over the data, I was surprised to find that I've been pedaling much slower since my cateye stopped recording cadence. In the first part of the ride, I was shocked that what I had thought felt like 80-85 rpm was actually closer to 70! This probably means that in the past couple months, I've been using higher gears than I should have...no wonder my ankle has been giving me trouble. I've now set cadence alerts, so that the unit will beep when I'm pedaling less than 75 or over 95 rpm. I'm banking on that being more helpful than annoying, but we'll see. I've also got a HR alert set up for anything over 160 bpm. My average HR on Saturday's ride was 159 bpm, which is much higher than I'd like for a 22-mile ride with two rest stops. I think it was more the heat/humidity than the effort, but all the same...I'd rather not be anaerobic for over an hour if I can help it.

So, my first impression of the Edge is a good one. I think it's going to be a great training tool, and I'm looking forward to seeing the numbers change over time, as I get better/faster/hopefully lighter.