Reflections on early season fitness

My wife and I did pretty much the same ride as I did earlier in the week; about 35 kms and 400 m climbing.

As we were biking down in the 'flatlands' I was looking up at the mountains we were biking last summer and reflecting on my present fitness level.

It is interesting to think the fitness level will be back up there again at some point this summer. I am wondering how long it'll be before I post a 70 km and 2000 m of climbing ride.

First Ride of 2008

This was my first bike ride this year. About 35 kms and 400m of climbing.


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Moving this blog to blog.swissbiking.com

This blog is moving to:

http://bikeswitzerland.blogspot.com/

I'm looking forward to a good summer of biking. I've set aside a good chunk of time for some bike touring around the alps. I expect one of my friends to be coming over from Canada to join me for at least one of the trips.

~Tony

Surfing the web for biking stories of Switzerland

It is raining today here Zugerland so I spent a while surfing the web and listening to podcasts.

Two of my favorite sports podcasts are (great for loading up my MP3 player):

• www.ironmantalk.com - two very friendly New Zealanders talk about 'all things Ironman'
• www.competitorradio.com - lots of interviews of famous triathletes and cyclists

My favorite site that I visited today was done by a guy who has been coming to the alps for bike touring since about 1959:

• Jobst Brant's bike tours http://www.trentobike.org/Countries/Europe/Tour_Reports/Tour_of_the_Alps/ - read about him riding some of the hardest passes with his wooden rimmed bike wheels

Created two prototype t-shirts

Gabrielle and I designed www.swissbiking.com t-shirts and had two prototypes made up. Here is a couple of pictures of Gabrielle wearing one of them.

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Embedding biking maps on a wiki

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Yesterday was spent working on the new Swiss Biking Wiki and with my new GPS equipped bike computer.

I spent sometime learning how to embed various kinds of maps on the wiki like the one above. The results of some of my experiments can be seen on the GoogleMaps page on the bike switzerland wiki.

I got my first lessons for how to do it by looking at the Motion Based website. It is the website service I plan to use for uploading, and analyzing GPS data from my bike rides.