NorthCascades Member

Do you have bike shops nearby? Comfort is an excellent reason to test ride!

I'm jealous. It's 57F. We're not getting summer this year.

https://4iiii.com/usa/products/pdp/clearance-left-side-precision-powermeter-ride-ready/shimano-ultegra-fc-6800-172-5mm-previously-ridden/ $240 for a used, left crank arm power meter. I personally wouldn't go with a lefty, but lots of people have them and use them to benefit their training and for other purposes. My…

It's an opinion not a fact, so you can argue it either way and decide where you come down. But it probably doesn't matter, all any of us can do is focus on ourselves.

Here's a used PowerTap wheel for $120.…

Your intuition is right, but the devil is always in the details. The energy balance equation for cycling is basically speed = power (energy use) vs all opposing forces. You mentioned grade, or gravity; on a road bike the biggest one is often air resistance. The energy it takes to cut through the air goes down by up to 1/3…

PS - you can pair the watch to tie Varia and it will vibrate noticably on your wrist when there's traffic behind you. I find it works very well in practice.

If you want a ballpark calorie estimate, you have to suffer give it something to estimate from (gigo) or accept what it gives you based on not really having any information. Speed isn't really a meaningful thing for outdoor cycling except in controlled circumstances because wind, traffic, and other factors have such a…

I've loved having a GPS watch and my experience is that it works well for cycling. Bike computers are better in some ways for the larger screen, especially for power based intervals, but a watch is much better in other ways including giving you a more holistic view of your activity and being appropriate for other sports.

I don't know enough about the FR series and 745 to answer specific questions. Here's a review that a lot of people use as if it were the manual: https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2020/09/garmin-forerunner-745-depth-review.html https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2021/04/garmin-forerunner-745-review-update-8-months-later.html It doesn't…

I try to focus on things that make me happy. I'm not going for the stress.

Sometimes it's good to have a quick recap, forgive me for being Captain Obvious. When you run, you're using your muscles to propel yourself forward, they need oxygen to make most of their fuel, which is why your heart rate goes up (to supply oxygenated blood). Your limit isn't your muscles, it's how much oxygen you can…

I love lunch rides!

I leave my phone at home sometimes when I go out and play. Works fine, and people can't bother me. Plus I can't lose or drop and break it. Also I hike where there's no reception. Runners don't like to run with their phones, for the most part. Garmin makes a lot of excellent watches and especially caters to runners, so…

FYI The new goodie is $400. 😳 I guess that's not unreasonable for a radar, bright taillight, and video camera. It's more than I would want to spend though. I found out there previous generation radar and taillight RTL515 is on sale for $150. No camera. If anybody wants the radar but not the camera that's the obvious…

I love the radar. I agree it's much less useful without some way of alerting you. I leave my light on solid mode, but it changes to blink when a car is behind me. It blinks faster when the car is moving faster and the blink slows down as the driver does. It's good for making them aware of me and of their speed. I ride…

Any of them will do this.

Can the solar panels collect all the energy that lands on them? I guess the Garmin can only tell me what the sensors collect, it can't measure what it can't see, like a measuring cup that overflows. If not, the amount of sun I'm getting could be more than it says...

Wow, every 125 pounds person does the same intensity for 30 minutes - and that makes sense to you?

If you want to learn about energy use on a bike, rent or borrow a power meter for a week or two. It's amazing how eye opening it is. Words like "moderate" and "intense" stop being useful because they're so vague as to mean anything.

I haven't charged it yet. I've used it a great deal including hours of multiband GPS. Battery is currently at 55% and started around 80% even it arrived in the box.

The pedals weigh the same thing no matter what the rider weighs. They call it a stationary bike because it doesn't move. You're literally sitting down, the bike is bearing your weight for you.

How much it helps with weight loss depends how much energy you put into the bike. It's possible to measure that precisely (bikes are a special case that allow for this) but it's expensive and probably makes more sense to let the scale answer. If you're enjoying it, keep doing it! It's definitely helping with weight, it's…

I've always wished the watches could just automatically go into power saving mode (turn off Bluetooth etc) at night. Glad that's finally a thing!

The barometer/altimeter in Fenix watches has always been very good in my experience. I like to calibrate mine from a topo map or known coordinates. Being able to do that with a touch screen is so much faster and easier than with buttons!

Go check the settings he mentioned that might be responsible. Do you need it to work, or do you need to know the story of how it broke?

FYI, https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/blob/master/README.md I'm not recommending this, I'm making people aware of its existence. 🙂 Paywalls don't apply to Google, so this browser plugin tells sites that you're Google. Or I think that's how it works, I haven't looked at the code. I don't use this…

Weird, I'm not a subscriber either, but it's probably a thing where I haven't used up my free articles yet. It reminds us how sleep tracking works, and suggests that we use it like calorie tracking, in that its job is to make us aware of patterns. It says to ignore the time spent in sleep stages because actually measuring…

I did that for a while. It wouldn't have saved me in these two cases, what happened seems exceedingly rare. (We call this an edge case.) I only saw one other person affected, months ago. But if you're concerned, this is a good way to protect yourself.

For the record. That cost them a lot of money. They sent you a watch, paid shipping (presumably both ways?), paid somebody to process the return, and the labor to debug the watch you sent them is expensive. They almost certainly investigate the dead hardware people sent them to figure out what went wrong and fix it - so…