Nice Fall Day

Today's ride
What a day! Not a cloud in the sky, nice and cool. A great day for a mountain bike ride. Climbed the first hill after the gate in Slate Canyon today. The trail is still closed, but the workers told me they are basically done. I can't wait until they open the trail back up and we can go further up the hill.

Calorie Calculator

There has been a lot of talk on the motionbased forums about how the calorie counter in the Edge 305 is not accurate. So I did a bit of searching and found an article on how to predict energy expenditure based on heart rate. I considered writing a program to "correct" the calorie expenditure in Training Center (the software that came with the Edge) but ended up getting bored with the project before I finished it.

However I decided I wanted to lose some weight in hopes that it would help me with my hill climbs. So I started counting calories that I am eating each day. The calorie counting has worked good at helping me lose the 10 pounds I figured I could lose. Now I just need to work at maintaining my new weight. Anyway this got me interested enough in the Edge calorie problem enough to put together a little calorie calculator in my blog. So I have added it to the left panel for anyone that cares. Given the number of minutes exercised, the average heart rate it gives a calculated calorie expenditure.

If you know your VO2max you can improve the calculation. Using the VO2max value you could also adjust the formula based on your fitness level. I'm no expert on VO2max but for a lower fitness level use a lower VO2max (50's?), for a higher fitness level a higher VO2max (60's?).

So for what it is worth here it is. http://www.epicbiking.com/calories.jsp

Battery Extender

For the LOTOJA I wanted to make sure I had enough battery time on the Edge to record the whole ride. Here is a picture of the battery extender I made for the ride.
It worked great. I was hanging back with a friend for half of the ride so my total time for the ride was over 13 hours and the Edge was able to record the whole ride.

Climbing

Today's ride
I made two attempts at climbing Glendon's hill today. On the second attempt I think I made it higher than I ever have before. I'm not sure if it is just in my head or not, but I seem to be climbing better with the new wheel.

This is a picture from the top of Dry Canyon.

New wheel

Shoreline trail
I have had two freewheels disintegrated on me this year. After the second one I figured there must be something wrong with the hub or freewheel and so I decided to buy a new wheel. Today was the first ride with the new wheel. The rim is 28mm wide compared to the normal 20mm wide. I wasn't sure if this would be a good thing or a bad thing. The wider rim should give more stability, and prevent the tire from rolling over the rim at low pressure, but it is heavier and so may be worse for climbing.

I don't know if it was all in my head or not. Maybe I wanted the new wheel to be good and so subconsciously I just performed better, but I seemed to be able to climb through my technical mistakes that normally would have ended the climb.

Also I rode a lot of the ride with Layne right behind me. In an effort to keep moving and not slow him down I was going a bit faster than I should have a few times. The last time I dropped down the 20ft dip at a good clip and on the way back up I was a bit out of control and smacked into a large boulder to the side of the trail. I stuck
arm out to protect me from the boulder and ended bending two of the fingers backwards. Now I have two nicely swollen fingers.

I'm not sure if the moral of today's ride is: "Keep arms and legs in the vehicle until the ride has come to a complete stop" or "Don't let Layne ride right behind you."