Hudson
Well-known member
I'm pretty much done with all the performance farkles to make the FJR perform better. All except one: weight. The cheapest farkle is losing weight, and taking off +30 lbs is my goal. Piefart is probably responsible for at least 10 of those lbs, what with his breakfast runs and pie. So I resolved this year to lose some of the added weight in my midsection, and get back to my fighting weight. I bought a road bike (the pedaling kind), and a close friend set me up with a high tech Garmin 310XT and scale.
You step on the scale and the watch records your weight, bodyfat/water and a bunch of other data. It sends it to Garmin's website for tracking, all automatically via an ANT (bluetooth-like) USB adapter. You just walk by your computer and it auto uploads.
It's fascinating getting data about your diet and exercise. I am completely rethinking everything. The Garmin watch reads a heart rate monitor, and includes a GPS. It can calculate a heap of data during your workout, and it also records your cadence and steps with a wireless adapter. It sends this data automatically to the website, so you can see how your workout went: how long, your heart rate over the workout, how many calories you burned, elevation change (for running/hiking/biking) and more.
I wondered whether riding my FJR burned any calories, and how it compared with bicyle riding. So I set out this weekend to find out.
Here what the Garmin concluded. Over a 88mile ride lasting over a couple of hours (mostly spirited riding in country roads, but a few highway blasts), I actually burned over 400 calories:
However, the chart only told part of the story. My heart rate varied a bit over the course of the ride:
You can tell by the detail where I had my most fun: a bit of two lane twisty section near the start of the ride. The rest was mostly loafing along (Sunday traffic) with a few twisty sections and some freeway blasts.
But here is where it gets absolutely fascinating. The Garmin samples your route every few seconds, and records: elevation, speed, location, heart rate. You can actually see exactly how fast you were at various sections of the route, and via a player, see how your speed and heart rate changes as you travel along the route:
Here's a contrast of elevation and speed:
And here is the player, which shows all of this data at every point in the route (note the player controls above, and the data points at the bottom; as the icon travels the route you rode, the data changes with it.
Totally cool. It would be awesome to have this data on the track, to be able to calculate your exit speeds as the course and elevation changes.
I'll be wearing this the next time Auburn and I do some single track trails on dirt bikes, where I expect to burn the same amount of calories but in less than an hour.
You step on the scale and the watch records your weight, bodyfat/water and a bunch of other data. It sends it to Garmin's website for tracking, all automatically via an ANT (bluetooth-like) USB adapter. You just walk by your computer and it auto uploads.
It's fascinating getting data about your diet and exercise. I am completely rethinking everything. The Garmin watch reads a heart rate monitor, and includes a GPS. It can calculate a heap of data during your workout, and it also records your cadence and steps with a wireless adapter. It sends this data automatically to the website, so you can see how your workout went: how long, your heart rate over the workout, how many calories you burned, elevation change (for running/hiking/biking) and more.
I wondered whether riding my FJR burned any calories, and how it compared with bicyle riding. So I set out this weekend to find out.
Here what the Garmin concluded. Over a 88mile ride lasting over a couple of hours (mostly spirited riding in country roads, but a few highway blasts), I actually burned over 400 calories:
However, the chart only told part of the story. My heart rate varied a bit over the course of the ride:
You can tell by the detail where I had my most fun: a bit of two lane twisty section near the start of the ride. The rest was mostly loafing along (Sunday traffic) with a few twisty sections and some freeway blasts.
But here is where it gets absolutely fascinating. The Garmin samples your route every few seconds, and records: elevation, speed, location, heart rate. You can actually see exactly how fast you were at various sections of the route, and via a player, see how your speed and heart rate changes as you travel along the route:
Here's a contrast of elevation and speed:
And here is the player, which shows all of this data at every point in the route (note the player controls above, and the data points at the bottom; as the icon travels the route you rode, the data changes with it.
Totally cool. It would be awesome to have this data on the track, to be able to calculate your exit speeds as the course and elevation changes.
I'll be wearing this the next time Auburn and I do some single track trails on dirt bikes, where I expect to burn the same amount of calories but in less than an hour.
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