Record your rides

I've been using Mapmytracks.com to record my cycling to and from work for the past year now. And if I were to offer any advice to aspiring cyclists who wish they could ride more, it would be to get a gps and record all of you rides. I found gps to be the best motivational tool available. Mapmytracks.com has multiple ways of analyzing your ride and comparing it to other similar rides in the past. You can figure out where you have gained speed and where you need to work on your riding.

The program can be combined with more serious training tools, which I do not use. However, it is possible to measure cadence and heart rate, and sync this data to your gps data to get a complete picture of your ride and the amount of exertion you are putting into your workout.

At any rate, today is the end of my first year recording my rides. My total mileage on my bike came out to 5059 miles. Not bad for a year of commuting to work on my bicycle. Assuming I drove those miles in our Prius, which gets 45mpg, and $3.50/gallon of gas that's 112 gallons of gas saved, and $433. Nice.

Travels with Ralph

I've decided to name my bike. I didn't think long or hard about the name. I knew one thing I wanted to avoid the cliché treatment of vehicles as female. Plus the placement of his frame pump is decidedly not female:

Ralph

That's right, his name is Ralph. It's simple. It's easy to remember. It's synonymous with vomiting.

My wife asked me, "Why Ralph"? My answer, "Why not"?

I've had Ralph since January, and we've traveled over 2600 miles together. A major chunk of that (1087 miles) was when I was competing in the MarchMiles competition over at mapmytracks.com. A competition I came very close to winning if it hadn't been for the sneaky exploits of my closest rival in the competition, Roystein. 

While Ralph and I did not emerge from that competition at the top of the podium, we did emerge very familiar with each other. And we had some serious fun along the way.