This week I made a high tech purchase for my bike. I bought a Garmin Edge 305 GPS with a heart monitor and cadence tracking. My birthday is less than a week away, and I received an unexpected bonus at work; the perfect storm for making a luxury purchase. Brett is always the one to get a leg up on technology. Well, I did it this time. I suspect it will be short-lived. I expect to see a GPS on his bike within a month.
You may ask, “Why do you need a GPS on your bike?” It is a wonderful thing. It tacks my distance, elevation, speed, heart rate, and many other things. It downloads this information to my laptop where I can analyze my rides. The coolest thing is that it uploads the ride to Garmin Connect, a web-based interface that pairs the GPS data with Google Maps and adds a variety of charts and graphs to analyze the data.
Below is a portion of the on-line display from my Friday evening ride on the Portage Hike and Bike from Kent to Ravenna.
