There was no need for Rule #74 until the cyclometer showed up on our handlebars. According to the late Sheldon Brown, the cyclometer has been around since the early 1900s.
“Star-wheel cyclometers, such as the Lucas unit, suffered two serious problems. They made an annoying “tink-tink-tink” noise. At high speeds, the star wheel would sometimes turn too far when hit by the fast-moving striker, then, the next time around the striker would hit the tip of one of the star points, sometimes knocking the unit out of position.”
My thought is, these things have been annoying us for much too long. As a youth no one had any measuring device on their bike. There are no old black and white photos of racers staring down at their front hubs to the Lucas meters. Eddy had retired before the Avocet made its debut. He would have caused his to go to failure or he would have removed it because it was extra weight and rubbish.
I bought an Avocet digital cyclometer as soon as I could. It had two slightly inset buttons to better hold water to seep inside. It read speed and elapsed time. That was something to get excited about. Going from no data to data was big, this was going to improve cycling.
Thirty years and many cyclometers later I’m not convinced. My most recent model was a Cateye wireless cyclometer with heart rate and it demanded a new battery every two months…enough! I needed anything else, which made me ask an obvious question- why? Do I care how fast I’m going? I know it’s not very fast and no I don’t really care.
It’s more a question of how hard am I going? Hard or not so hard and again, I’m not trying to quantify this anymore. I’m no quant. I’m beyond quant. It’s not being too old as much as I’ve been riding for so damn long the numbers no longer interest me. Even if I was training for a specific event I have moved past the desire to have data. I did encourage my wife into upgrading to a Garmin 500 as she is into data. I encouraged her because I wanted to know the grades of some of our climbs. I should have kept quiet and emulated a friend who actually went out with a tape measure and long level and quantified the grades to the island’s most “interesting” climbs, bless his heart.
It’s been gratifying to look around on the Sunday group ride I’ve fallen into and notice that some of my cycling friends also have no cyclometers on their bikes. I’m not even sure it’s an interesting point of discussion amongst us. The people who are training with data don’t show up on this ride often because we spend the first 40 km gossiping, riding two abreast, riding a route too curvy, hilly and breath-taking for staring at a watt meter. The second part, I’ve heard*, turns sporty as the big guns get fired leaving bodies scattered along the route home. Training with data requires control of effort. Luckily my people have little interest in that. This Sunday ride is more pleasure than pain and I don’t need a meter to tell me a serious workout was logged.
I was visiting friends who worked and lived in Monaco and was told about the eighty year old owner of the building they rented in. Most every Sunday morning he and his buddies would kit up and go for a ride either east into Italy or west into France. I assume this had been the routine for decades. Eventually they would stop for a nice long Sunday lunch then they ride to the nearest train platform, roll their bikes on the train and return home via rail. Damn, I want to be one of those guys if I get close to eighty. And damn I wish I had a bike and kit when I was there, it would have been a riot to ride with them. I bet those old dudes have V-meters on their bikes.
*either I have turned back before the official turn around or I’m shelled out so early that all I hear are the distant reports. At some point the return always becomes a death slog and as such, a good training ride.
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YES!! Awesome, Gianni! I've been contemplating this lately too. I really don't care about numbers. My riding these days is purely for fun and to get out there because I have a lot else going on in my life. I know I'm not very fast. Why do I need help?
I was contemplating pulling off my goddamn Vetta computer because it just dies when it feels like it and totally shuts off. Happened the other day and I spent a minute wondering what my total kms would be when I should have been enjoying the ride and the beautiful leaves.
I do like knowing total distance but boy oh boy, this has me considering just ditching them. Like the smooth looks of the bikes and bars without them anyway.
Great one! And yeah, I hope I'm living somewhere when I'm 80 that allows me to ride into one country, or another, then take a train home. Let me write THAT down as my training goal!!!
I just got a Garmin 500. It was so cheap I couldn't pass it up. I like the data myself. But I can also see, especially with things like Garmin's, where you get too focused on the numbers. I tend not to pay attention to the computer out on the road ("Dooode, How many watts are you doing right now? My coach said not to do anything over 250 today.") as it's distracting. But I do like to crunch numbers at home, off the bike.
And I can see where Strava segments become like Vegas hookers to a sex addict; totally useless and harmful, but fun at the time you're doing them.
bought my first cyclometer a few months ago, and immediately was fascinated by knowing my speed and annoyed with looking at my stem every 12 seconds. as soon as the battery started dying, I removed it and have no plans to replace either the battery or the meter, ever. are my guns blasting with pain? no? then i'm not going fast or hard enough, period.
Being new in Belgium I bought a Garmin Edge 500 just to find out where the hell I went on my Sunday morning rides with the local club (http://www.twc-hoekske-maleizen.be/). There were so many killer climbs that they routinely took me on I had to know where they were. I would say it paid for itself after one month of awesome rides. I never much looked down at the display as most of the time it was reflecting sunlight back into my face but the route recording was well worth it. I did, however, keep close attention to the time of day because I was only given a four hour window by the wife and that was not negotiable.
post-quant.
love it...
I once found myself out on a ride with exactly 3 time-pieces or at least 3 pieces that could in one form or the other tell me the time including the cat-eye. At one point I found myself actually wanting to know the time but none of my three time pieces could actually tell me the one thing I wanted to know. Distance travelled, average speed, heart rate everything but the actual time. In the end I gave up and asked a pedestrian.
I have now ditched my combined watch and heart rate monitor when during another ride it stopped its incessant beeping because I was "in-zone" or maybe I was "out of zone" I am not sure which. Anyway at the time I was cycling through a disused railway tunnel converted to a cycle path. So picture the scene. I am travelling down a dark tunnel, there is a light at the end, I am travelling towards the light. My heart rate monitor stop bleeping......................
I love having data after the ride, and I particularly like that when you have Strava properly set up it'll let you how many kms you have on all your components.
I like seeing my overall progress, and being able to see year-over-year improvements (I've been using Strava since 2010). Of course, you could get the same info by logging everything by hand in an Excel spreadsheet or similar, but I like being able to combine laziness with technology and have Strava do it for me.
@scaler911 do yourself a favor and make the main screen only show one thing, like your current speed or the time of day or something like that. It makes collecting ride data easy while keeping you from becoming distracted during the ride with all that data.
@Overijse That was a good purchase. If I moved to Belgium, knowing where and how steep all these hidden climbs are would be very important. And how to get home again might be a good thing too. When we were there last spring I never knew where I was. Especially in the van, hurtling around the country by highways and secondary roads, in equal amounts.
@E Clear!
Nice one @Gianni! It'shard riding in a group (for me) using a V-meter. I need it at the moment to reign me back when I get to the front as the "Easy!" shout doesn't come till I've opened a gap (on a couple of occasions during the Scottish Cogal).
"Racing is life. Anything that happens before or after is just waiting." - Steve McQueen.
Well, Steve was racing cars in LeMans, so there was no need to train. But when not racing or training, crunching data is a fine pursuit. I map rides out with GPS Visualizer, and record the results into Excel.
During the ride? V-meter only. I use a Planet Bike 9.0, which is simple and reliable. I modified the mount to fit the stem on #1. And even then... when I forget it, sometimes I go harder. I've learned to not pay too much attention to it, and just ride off effort. It's mostly there so I can punch in elapsed time and km traveled at the end of the day.
And as someone who dismantles their multi-tool and removes the hex keys not needed for my bike - I'll be damned if you'll find me riding around with my iPhone. That's for reading Velominati whist on the loo at work.