Mar 10 2010
Hey Cyclemeter, you are my new favorite iPhone app.
In my last post I briefly touched upon a slight problem with Fitnio. Specifically, it wouldn’t upload my ride. Well, after that happened on three or four more rides, Fitnio decided it wouldn’t even open at all. It would just crash, every single time I tried to use it. I reinstalled it, restored my phone, and cursed it up and down, but nothing would fix it. Not even the most creative curses I could muster. So you know what, Fitnio? You’re out. You suck and I never liked you much anyway.
I hereby declare Cyclemeter to be The New Hotness. I used it for the first time today, and it… it just… you guys, it is a dream. I won’t devote space here to listing its features, suffice to say that it does everything they say, and it does it well. If you check my Twitter you’ll see that it can tweet when you start and finish your ride. HOW COOL IS THAT?! It even uses less battery power than Fitnio. You hear that, Fitnio? You suck so hard.
The one flaw I saw was that it clocked my first couple of miles at around 79 mph, which isn’t entirely accurate. 7.9 mph would be closer. I’ll give it a pass though, because when I started out it warned me that the GPS signal was weak. Fortunately it allows the user to change any stats it records, so I scrubbed my amazing but untrue top speed from the record.
Oh and by the way, riding’s going well… Missed a couple of weeks because of jury duty, equipment failure, and weather (I will NOT ride in the rain, I don’t care if that makes me a wuss). But today was great, the weather is steadily improving, and I won’t have jury duty again for at least a year. Expect to see some more frequent rides tweeted, thanks Cyclemeter!





On Tuesday the thunderstorms blew through and the afternoon was pristine – crystal blue spring sky, steady breeze from due west, just a bit of coolness in the air. Perfect. I wrapped things at the office and dashed home with visions of a 50+ mile ride on a great route. I was just about to swing my leg over the bike and roll when it occurred to me that at the end of Sunday’s ride, I hit a large rock with my rear tire. I decided to see if there was any damage. What I saw is in the pic! YIKES!!! About 300 miles ago, Bill at the bike shop said I had maybe 100 miles left in this tire. I rode this tire down a 13% grade at 45 mph on Sunday at the end of a hard 36 miler that included another very technical descent that has 2 switch backs! Not to put too fine a point on it, but I didn’t ride. Instead, I loaded up and went straight to Chainwheel. A new set of Continentals, AND a new chain, AND a new cassette. Oh man! The chain had about 3500 hard miles on it….and the cassette? It’s my original from 3 years ago….closing in on 9000 miles. That bright , shiny new one is an Ultegra 12-28, which is quite a change for me. We’ll see how it works out. And, yes I found the chunk that the rock cut into the tire. :-)


