starting my new year revolutions

I've just loaded a few targets into Garmin for 2017. I used to load monthly targets, but last year I worked from annual ones, along with some of the cycling training plans in TrainerRoad.

At this point the main thing is to get started, so I've clocked up a few creaky miles today as a way to signal that Ive restarted. Actually, Garmin wouldn't even let me log on, with some kind of password problem, so I can tell it's been too long since I was last on a bicycle.

squeezing TSS and IF metrics from the Garmin

Thursday evening I was out for an agreeable supper in a fancy restaurant. It's another one of the times when I've not got around to posting anything to the blog, but it does open a slot for me to back-post in a handy reference table.

The handy reference table is for the general opposite of what I was doing Thursday evening. Eating duck egg amuse bouche followed by courses that could have ended with a serious amount of chocolate (except I managed to side-step the pudding).

So my handy reference table comes courtesy of an article by two wheel blogs about cycling.

Some might know I've set up my bike with a gadget that stores various metrics that can be uploaded to spreadsheets and the internet. There's all the usual stuff about speed, pedalling rate and calories, but I thought it would be interesting to try out the extra measures (I'd call them proxy metrics) that show (a) how demanding a particular ride is and (b) what state it's left me in. I've been using trainingpeaks.com for this.

There's a measure called Intensity Factor (IF) as a way to show the difficulty of a particular session and the Training Stress Score (TSS) relates to the personal impact it will have and how long to recover.

There's loads of cleverness around all of this, but I'm more interested in figuring out whether one ride I do is measurably more demanding than another. One way I tell is by how clammy I feel by the end, but I thought it would be fun to play around with the numbers too.

Hence the simple ready reckoner, which gives me a sense of what is happening.

I thought I'd also post my current plots from when I started the current measures in January.

It shows that I could ride a fairly short distance and it would seem like a fairly 'intense' ride. Through January the perceived intensity of individual rides started to lessen (see the blue dots dropping), presumably as I got more used to what I was doing. The actual loading of the rides varied somewhat (the red dots for each ride), but were mainly within a middle band.

The most interesting line is the blue one which is gently rising. That's supposed to be my general bicycling fitness, which does seem to be going up. Empirically that also seem to be the case because as an example I did around 18 miles this morning with relative ease. I'd have been spluttering a bit more a few weeks ago when I did this.

The pink dip in the middle of the range is a week when I was away somewhere and didn't do any cycling at all. It shows my residual degree of fatigue dropping until I restarted (it soon gets back to the same level though).

I'm doing this for fun, and don't necessarily have the charting model very well calibrated at the moment, but it sort of feels as if its saying the right kind of things.

I've also separately noticed that except for weekends I seldom cycle for more than an hour in one go. I'm thinking I should tip over the hour in the week now the weather and hours of daylight are improving.

If I can get it working properly I'll probably post an update, because rather than just counting miles and calories, this has some interesting potential.

For fans of detail, the amuse bouche evening is the second red/blue dot pair from the right hand end of the x-axis. Oops, do I see a small dip afterwards?

cycling with a statistical edge

I seem to be keeping up with my bicycling plans and have managed to avoid revising my targets downward as well. The biggest change to my original plan was to move the start of the week from Monday to Sunday for cycling.

That gives an encouragement to cycle on Sunday at the 'start' of the week, when I can get ahead of the plan. I still have a Saturday at the end for any last minute catchup miles as well.

This week, it's only Tuesday and I notice I only have 9 miles left to finish the target I set for the week.

I shall hesitate to increase the target number though, because I'm sure there are weeks when I'm away and then it can be more difficult to find the relevant slots.

To make the counting simpler, I upload the miles from the bike speedo gadget (its a Garmin Edge 800) and the system I use lets me set the targets and will monitor them for me. Actually it monitors a wild range of things well beyond those that I currently use.

I think it's better than me trying to remember to keep notes and I only have to clip the little unit onto my bike to be fully wired and counted. Ant+ Personal Area Networks are a good idea.

I discovered that the Garmin Connect system will also let me set up all kinds of other targets too, so I've been adding some such as monthly targets and moving away from just miles to other things as well. I've included some deliberately easy ones in the set too, so that I get some positive feedback and encouragement along the way. The longest ones I've set up are for the whole year, in miles and in calories.

Update : and as I've also been for a spin today, here's the 'after' from the 'before' version shown above. Those targets with 4 days and 7 days left will scroll away at the end of the week into a history section, but a new set will then appear to replace them.

So far, so good!

wired again

I've been playing around with some of that personal area network software over the last few days. The kind that runs at a very local (body) level. Its really an extension of the cycle iPhone applications and I've been interested to see what is available for a few quid that boosts insight and maybe works with stuff I already own.

My old Polar Heart Rate Monitor is an example, as is the cadence detector and wireless speedometer on my hybrid bike. Add the GPS detectors from the iPhone, plus maybe a digital blood pressure reading and there's a lot of data available which can be fed through into the SportsTrackLive type of applications.

Maybe the embedded skinplex system and 6LowPAN options need to be ruled out at the moment; suitable for arctic predator monitoring but it involves physically implanting chips - I'll only do that in combination with a fish supper.

Wireless Body Area Networks(WBAN) running at 10 to 20 Mb per second are already faster than the design of early 2000 office networks. Thoughtfully, FCC Part15.209 has drafted radiated emission limits to stop us all from overheating with this stuff.

However, I suspect this technology will diffuse into the next generation of iPhones and similar. The ant + technology is -er- small and embeddable into the various monitors to then commune with items like gym equipment to track personal readouts.

Plus the emerging generation of applications like iBike Dash and iBiker , which will look so much neater with the receivers embedded like Bluetooth.

I shall be "monitoring" this body of work.