Am Thu, 26 Jun 2025 17:37:44 -0400 schrieb Frank Krygowski <
[email protected]>:
But those of you who do use Garmins to collect data on each ride, can
you describe what you do with the data?
025-06-21: Bonn <-> Remagen by bike.
<
https://www.mystrobl.de/ws/pic/fahrrad/20250621/karte.jpg>
That's part of an illustrated writeup of my tours that I collect on my
web server and publish it elsewhere.
How do you process it?
I take the track*) from a ride, compute some bounding rectangle, enlarge
that a bit, create a 3D-Map for that area, decide what map tiles to use
and on a zoom level, apply some voodoo to the lights, adjust the camera
(view, focal length, ...), add the aforementioned track, perhaps add a
few other tracks for context or comparison, add some waypoints and
finally modify the thickness and color of some tracks.
Sometimes I like to play around with what Blender offers for polishing
scenes like that, sometimes I just render the resulting view into an
image. That gets polished using a photo editor. The image gets some
final touches, including adding some data as an overlay, some part from
Garmin Connect (distance ridden, average power, ...), another one
computed by a little script of mine that creates an altitude graph.
What
significant information do you glean from it, and what use do you make
of that information?
I just enjoy it and use it as part of an illustrated, enhanced web based
diary for my cycling activities. I like to scroll through my notes and
fotos from earlier years, including occasionally doeing some summaries
that combine a collection from rides selected by a specific time range
or area. Say: where in my area have I been riding two years ago? Where
did we ride in France, during our first vacation after retirement? The
fun of having data is that you find new uses for it, now and then.
"Significance" is in the eye of the beholder. What significant
information do you get from doing leisure rides by bike?
As always, I have at least three reasons to ride bike, to varying
degrees. It gets you to a destination quickly, it makes and keeps you
fit and, last but not least, it's fun.
The data I collect serves all three purposes, again to varying degrees
and in different ways. Garmin Connect, the web portal, specifically
delivers enough training data that helps finding the right amount of
work quickly.
Measurement, recording and finally control of distance, altitude, speed,
power, cadence and heart rate makes it possible to stay in the
performance ranges that are favorable for a desired training effect.
If even professional competitive athletes, who have much more
experience, (have to) rely on such measuring and evaluating support,
then it should be understandable that someone with less or no training experience may benefit even more from it. YMMV, of course.
This is honest curiosity.
And this is a partial answer, only. I've collected recorded tracks from
most of my bicycle rides since I got the means for it in 2007/2008.
Combined with pictures taken with various digital cameras that I carried
with me on my resp. our rides, I can still reconstruct our rides across
the landscape. Now that I have the time and some better tools, I
sometimes do it again, finding new aspects, using different pictures and different views. Sometimes, when a TdF etappe touches a road or an area
where we have been cycling during a past vacation, I do a mashup. Etc.
On the other hand, most of all those many photos on paper or slides and
old paper maps from Michelin with markings collect dust, somewhere out
reach and out of sight. Before retirement, I had access to a slide
scanner from Nikon, but no time, so only a few slides got scanned. I
_do_ have a slide duplicator for my Nikon D7000 which is even better,
when combined with a strong, camera controlled flashlight. But scanning
slides that way is time consuming manual work and not easily automated,
so still only a few slides got scanned.
Frankly, I don't miss the old ways. I still can create photos on paper
and sometimes I do, for a small subset. A drugstore chain nearby has
photo printers that can print pictures up to postcard size and it's not
even expensive. It only takes me a good ten minutes to copy pictures
onto an SD card or USB stick, walk or ride there, print them out, pay
and return home.
Back to training, for quite a while, I didn't look much at my training
data, anymore, becaused doing the right thing had become a habit. But
as I said, shit happens. I'm quite happy that I already had the means
of doing the necessary recovery training instead of being forced to
... but that's a story for another time. Let's just agree that it is
sometimes helpful to have alternatives.
*) ... by fetching the recorded .fit from its folder on the Garmin Edge, converting it from .fit to .gpx afterwards.
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