Since I discovered the superb Cyclemeter application which runs on the iPhone, I've been using it when I take the bike out. It's quite handy, because I just switch it on then use the 'off' switch on the iPhone and throw it into the backpack. It keeps a GPS track of movement, speed, altitude, location and plots it into kilometre or mile timings for a route. It even has a go at calculating calories. The recent update also deducts 'stopped time' which is useful as I sometimes switch it on when I'm making a cup of tea before a bike ride or similar.
Cyclemeter has its own application for recording the rides back to the internet, and it's just necessary to sync it every so often. This provides a useful map and various timing information about the ride, and its good fun to retrace it on Google maps and to use the mapping to decide possible extensions.
I then discovered sportstracklive a few days ago, which will happily upload the iPhone file generated by Cyclemeter.
The additional information provided in sportstracklive is mainly some statistics about 'personal best' and similar, as well as a splits by kilometre/mile and an equivalent mapping function.
Sportstracklive also adds a replay function, where you can watch a course thats been cycles/run/walked etc as it replays at an animated speed. Again useful for adding sections or options to a route. The same mapping can be used with the 'personal bests' so its possible to zoom into the map where they occur and to think about whether to do those sections faster.
Those that have read my previous posts around bicycling will see that I stop to look around and take the occasional photo as well, so I don't think I'll be turning in wildly amazing times, but its still fun to have this form of telemetry by just throwing the phone into the backpack. Oh and it works for walking, running etc as well, each of which can be separately classified.
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