Yesterday, I did my first ride after installing my new €5 cadence sensor and connecting it to my bike computer. I wanted to go for a short trip and when I left home, I assumed that I’d be alone. I was wrong. After about one kilometre, I met one of the triathletes from TriTeam Chaos who told me that he’d meet two other guys for a training trip. I went with them until Greifenstein, but then I returned because joining people whose stamina is about 100% higher than your own is rather exhausting :-)
In general, the trip was pleasant because I returned before it started to rain. The only negative thing was that this trip was meant to show that the cadence sensor and the bike computer work together. They did so for the first four kilometres, but then all of a sudden, the bike computer failed to display the speed (the cadence was still shown). Today, I disassembled everything and found the reason: The cable connecting the bike computer to the speed sensor was torn. Since I couldn’t find a replacement part, I tried to fix it myself. Those who know me a bit better know I’m not a very handy person, but nonetheless, I managed to connect the cable again! The funny thing is that I explicitly bought a wired bike computer because I feared that the sensor’s battery could fail at any time without warning. Now I know that something similar can also happen with a wired sensor :-(
Because of this hardware problem, the data below comes from my Forerunner 405 (which I’m about to replace with a Forerunner 910XT with a wireless cadence sensor!).

The usual numbers:

Note: The climb was measured using a non-calibrated barometric altimeter; the amount of energy consumed was calculated from the measured heart rate and physiological parameters.

The GPX file recorded with my eTrex can be found here.

Read more about the “Tracking for Freedom” project here. All blog posts about the project are tagged Tracking for Freedom.