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.

Garmin Edge 350 cycling computer arrived

Today my new cycling computer arrived. It is a beautiful looking gizmo, Garmin Edge350, that will record entire trips with GPS data, elevation, heart rate, speed and cadence. I've wanted a litte toy like this for while.

So far I am pleased with the out-of-box experience. I installed the software on my computer and plugged in the device. It started charging itself right away from the USB cable and my computer was able to connect to it. I played with the screens on the device a bit, set it for metric, and watched for it to find the GPS satellite. The device has a good quality feel to it. I would say everything went well and so far it has exceeded my expectations.

I will hook it up today and tomorrow I will take my bike out for a spin. So stay tuned for some blog entries backed with lots of data. The thing is small enough I will be taking it running with me too.

ciao
Tony

Lauching of a blog and wiki for Swiss Biking

This blog replaces the old blog at http://amowers.blogspot.com/ . Hopefully the name change is self-explanatory.

A companion wiki http://swissbiking.pbwiki.com/ has been created. The new site for the wikipedia of Swiss biking? Perhaps not, but a person can dream.

The exploration themes for this year, in order of priority, will be:

• Alpine Passes
• Major Rivers
• National Bike Routes

Along with the new blog and wiki we have some new equipment:

• road-bike: Rocky Mountain Solo50st
• GPS bike computer: Garmin Edge 350 with GPS, Heart Rate Monitor, and Cadence Sensor

We have a whole year of biking ahead of us. I'm curious to see how it turns out.

cheers
Tony