Use the Five, Pedalwan.
I could feel the power in my body as I breathed in the warm Spring air and pulled lightly on the handlebars; strength flowed from my lungs and shoulders into my chest, through my hips and down to my legs which churned over with alarming ease. With every change of gradient, I either stood on the pedals to maintain the rhythm or shifted into a bigger gear to gain speed, depending on whether the slope increased or decreased.
This was Gibralter in Santa Barbara County, California; the climb had put me to shame some fifteen months before, causing me to suffer much more than I was prepared to do but on this occasion she repaid my training with nothing but total grace. The Man with the Hammer was clearly on a mission on some far away slope, leaving only his wife, La Volupté to watch over me. It was one of the best rides I’ve had on a bike, feeling The V flow through me so elegantly despite the difficulty of the climb.
The question came up after the ride as to how quickly I had completed the climb, but since I rode the climb using only a V Meter and nothing that tracked any trackable sort of data, there was no tangible evidence to indicate how quickly I’d ridden to the summit. Yet, the sensations I felt during the climb were all I needed to know; the experience was mine alone to experience, a secret held in confidence between rider, road, and mountain.
Riding without data is the equivalent of Luke Skywalker putting away his targeting computer and using The Force instead to aim his proton torpedoes at the Death Star exhaust port. Data and Strava are useful and enjoyable tools by which to quantify our efforts, but we should never allow them to obscure the beauty of our labors.
Vive la Vie Velominatus.
Thanks to @blackpooltower for this inspired idea.
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@Ccos
You can always make rides private. If you know someone is studying your Strava feed for training honts you can really fuck with them by showing some of your training but not all of it.
I was thinking about this post the other night and I realised that although I tend to always ride with my garmin on the stem the only numbers I really pay attention to are distance and time, because I tend to always ride within a strict time deadline so knowing how far I've been and how long I have left to go is pretty important.
I like to analyse my ride afterwards; to know I'm improving rather than just to feel it. Because your mind and body play tricks - sometimes when you feel like you're flying you absolutely are. And sometimes when you feel like crap and your lungs are about to emerge from your throat and you can barely pedal, you realise when you look at the data later that it was because you were turning yourself inside out and you were actually riding stronger than ever.
And I do use HR a lot - now I've been riding with HR for about a year that little number gives me a lot of information; it's a guide to make sure I don't cook myself on long rides, it makes sure I do cook myself on short rides and training intervals, and it even lets me know when I haven't eaten enough and am on y way towards meeting L'Homme (i.e. when you are slogging your guts out but your HR wont go up).
I have speed on my Garmin but it's not that important - effort in is the key when training, speed should be the output.
I'm rambling.
Being too gianormous to climb - When I started racing again, I had to be concerned with cutoff times in some of the races and I used it to hold myself accountable. Average speed was my stopwatch. Don't go too fast and burn myself up, but don't go too slow and miss the target time. It became a habit in my training rides to check that I was staying on track. I race MTB and never the double track hell of Leadville so my eyes are on the trail and rarely glance at the computer.
When I have a ride without specific objectives the computer is totally transparent to me, completely ignored other than pushing start and stop. What I like about it is that sometime much later I'll be looking through strava for something and see "that" ride and it'll bring me right back to a good time.
In terms of Strava, I do like to see the change over time. Last season I went to a whole different level of training to prepare for the Breck Epic and I was absolutely crushed at times of proper training. I mean I hadn't seen a PR on a segment in months and was wearing an HRM to sleep to monitor for over-training, which was kicking in on the last few days of each block. At one point, I was kinda losing it and took a short break from structured training rides and BAM! PR on everything. To be able to see the effort pay off is what its all about.
But VMW is much newer to cycling and has learned to trained properly, but doesn't like the computer much and doesn't seem to be able to ignore it. We've had to work on technique, especially managing cadence and effort, so she has had to live with it sometimes. But she's a happier camper when it is in her jersey pocket, and I'm happiest on those rides with her too.
@RobSandy
When I did my first 100 MTB race HR was a trip. After about 70 miles my HR just kept sinking and sinking. By the finish it was about 50bpm below my max. I was riding up this 3500ft pass and looking down at the computer going UP! UP! UP! It went nowhere. Strange, strange sensation. The man with the hammer clocked me good about mile 70, but I bounced back.
I started riding with power meters a couple years ago when I realized I had to figure out something to climb faster, looked more and more into it and that the only equation that mattered was Power divided by Weight. I've worked very hard on both sides of that equation. But man that number next to W lays bare your weakness.
Ya'll see the photo of T Phinney putting e-tape over his SRM display just before the start of his winning TT performance at US Nat's? The force is strong with that cat.
@Vbikes
I love riding in the dark (although my rides are in the morning before sunrise). Just you and your cone of light (and suicidal rabbits running towards it). Very special feeling! And really easy to just really go! (however, to be completely honest, the garmin is there and loging it all, it's just too dark to see it. And to be even more honest, a lot of those rides are actually specific training rides, so the thing beeps at me at regular intervals. But still, me and my cone of light! Best rides!)
I like my garmin and strava and veloviewer and stravistiX and I have no idea why. I don't hurry to load my rides up, I don't really look at anything except the nice graphs that sometimes appear and I don't really compare except with myself.
But a lot of the guys I ride with these days, come from accidental encounters (and great rides, with a bit of show-off, obviously) along the river, a little extra 'congrats and thank you for the ride' on Strava afterwards and before I know it, we meet up again. So at the very least I owe Strava a thank you for some of my cycling friends.
Generally I ride with HR, time and distance. Seldom speed, I don't see the use of it, it doesn't tell you anything since it's too dependent on terrain, wind, group, traffic... Even afterwards, the average speed is just disappointing, since the ride to get me out and back in the city lets the average easily go down with 4 or 5 km/h compared to my 'cruising speed' (which is why I prefer stravistiX, it gives me a 75% percentile)
I used to have a relatively simple, wireless speedometer/cadence computer but the sensor is quite ugly on the bike so, I took it off. I was riding for a while with only a "V Meter" but found that it was hard to hold a (very) specific speed at the front of the group, unless riding two up with a partner that was willing to set the pace.
So, now I have a little Garmin on the stem - no ugly sensor, just the ugly unit on the stem. [I think a quill stem would look pretty weird with a computer on it, no matter how discrete.]
As for Strava, I think it can be pretty anti-social when you're riding with a friend and, all of a sudden, he takes off to log his time on a segment however, it is nice to see how many kms I've ridden - or not ridden, on a cumulative basis.