Sunday

27 January 2013

All right, I'm starting to take this whole thing about my gadgets not registering everything personally.

I've taken three very short bike rides in the last couple of days; I rode to Starbucks and back, and I've gone out just to go out. I have an odometer on the bike, but for the hell of it I downloaded the Map My Ride app to my phone so that I'd have a little more data to peek at.

Now, I've walked the route to Starbucks dozens of times. I know that measured on sidewalks, it's 1.6 miles. But the app had me at .78 miles on the bicycle, and even less on the way home. And I felt kind of crappy about that, because it took me over 10 minutes to ride those short distances.

Then today I went out for a short for-the-hell-of-it ride. I went a route I know well on foot, about a mile and a half. I turned the app on jsut before I started, turned it off when I got home, and it read only .56 miles in almost 10 minutes.

I'm slow, but I'm not that slow. And I know it's a lot further than that. My bike's odometer read more than that.

So I fired up the computer and went to the website to look at the maps...and damned if it didn't stop recording about halfway each time. I don't blame the app for that; I blame Dixon, where getting a good cell or satellite signal is like getting a surprise gift.

I edited the maps, adding in the parts the app missed, and felt a whole lot better about it. Today's sub-10 minute ride was actually 1.45 miles. The ride and back to Starbucks was a little over 3 miles, not the just under 1.5 the app read.

But really...I'm starting to think I'm just some weird gadget killer.

And I've got to take longer rides, because so far, it's just been pathetic.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have the same problem! You are not the gadget killer. I commend you on your decision to ride are walk! I don't have much diligence on that stuff. What I am trying to say is.....try driving the route you plan to bike or walk and be sure that you use the stat from the mileage. I did that after a hospital stay when I wanted to walk and found that it was really the most accurate. Hope this works!

Just Ducky said...

My pedometer reads shorter than my Garmin GPS. Just for consistancy, I stick with one reading, the GPS. We have decent cell coverage, so I trust the GPS.