Sunday, April 14, 2013

Advantages of being a cyclist

Amber and I had a fun ride today riding from Yorba Linda regional park to The Crema and back for a total of 70 miles. As usual the food was excellent. This is an extension of our usual The Crema ride because this was our last training ride for the Santa Cruz 400k. The weather was overcast with a persistent on shore flow. It even sprinkled on us a little.

My bottom bracket is making a creaking sound still so on the way back I drove over to Don's in Redlands to have them check it out and maybe replace the forks too. I was low on gas but the gas gauge still showed an 1/8th of a tank when I ran out of gas just as I was exiting the I-10 at University. I stopped on the shoulder of the off-ramp and started walking to try to find a gas station. After a few steps I realized I have a bike and a Garmin Edge. I jumped on the bike and used to Garmin to find the nearest gas station which turned out to be about a mile away.

As I rode to the gas station I passed an auto parts store and bought a one gallon gas container, rode on the gas station, filled it up (that must have looked odd), bungee corded the gas container to my aerobars, and rode back to the truck. It sure beat walking.

My long suffering bike is at Don's right now - I think I'm going to be spending some money on it.

I've been looking for an external power source for my Garmin Edge 705 for a while and I've not had any luck. It has a battery life of about 16 hours which is fine for up to a 300k but it dies on longer rides (yes, I know, I could ride faster). On the 600k I hosted last week one of the riders showed me is external battery pack made by Gomadic. I was so impressed I decided to buy one from Amazon the next day.

It's rare that a company makes a product that is exactly what you want, at a price less that you would expect, and delivers it faster than you would think possible. That's exactly what Gomadic did. I placed the order on Amazon on Monday morning, received a shipping notification on Monday afternoon, and the product was on my doorstep when I got home from work on Wednesday.

On my Saturday ride I put new batteries in and plugged in into my Garmin Edge 705. The backlight came on so I set it to the lowest setting (other than off) and started timing. It has been 22 hours and it is still going. I would have been happy at eight hours. I will update this blog when it finally dies.

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