iPhone apps that make cycling adventures better

As you can tell, I love my iPhone and now that there are custom apps you can do all kinds of neat stuff. Besides having the ability to take calls and snap photos, the apps bring real power to this phone.
Here are some of my favorite ride supporting apps:













GPS Kit
This app collects GPS information and has 4 main components. 1. A dashboard that is customizable where you can see things like: Average Speed, Altitude, Bearing
2. Ability to record tracks so that you can publish a journey.
3. A waymark recording screen to save a location.
4. A map view.



















Geocaching
This is the official app from GroundSpeak. Makes it easy to look for caches nearby.



















GeoHash
This is an app to calculate your nearest Geohash locations and map them.



















WeatherBug
There is more accurate weather forecast info on Weather Underground but WeatherBug makes checking the rain and wind so easy.



















EverNote
This is a great app that allows you to record 'stuff' like pictures, text and voice notes. When making a note from the iPhone, it adds your location to the note.

October Geocycling

It has been an while... I will try harder to maintain a posting rate. With working out of town and having this site blocked by work and being busy while I am home and finding time to ride, it is not easy carving out time to write posts.

In the last couple months there has been a few things occurring:

• July was such a month of miles and personal bests that I started to burn out and loose motivation.
• August was busy with swimming and other activities that got in the way.
• I was able to upgrade my iPhone to a 3G in a cost positive way.
• Which led to Geocaching as a new hobby, since I now have a GPS on my phone.

The result is that I am riding fewer miles and going much slower but with many new distractions to the rides. I incorporate geocaching with riding and am also doing cycloharvesting. That is my name for riding along and finding fruit trees along the roadsides. This year there is a lot of fruit and it has a better flavor and quality than years past. With the iPhone, i can take waymarks of good trees and am building a Google myMap of these.
Suprisingly, or not, my enjoyment of riding has increased with these extra activities.

One ride this week reached the sublime. I did a 45 mile ride out Bunker Creek and Lincoln Creek on Monday and then Tuesday I thought that I would, 'take it easy' and just fill in local caches.
The route ended up being 33 miles and including a leg up to Connor Rd in Thurston County to get a cache at Mary A Cogdil's gravesite.
Some other finds along the way were an antique anti-aircraft searchlight and another antique glass insulator for my collection.

Bike web tools that I like

Doing a lot of bike riding and being of a geek nature, I like to turn details of riding into data.

There are several good websites that are of assistance to a rider, here of some of my favorites:

Bikely -- find and map routes

I have tried other route making tools but bikely is the one that I have stuck with. One of the main reasons is that it does not lock up when accessing from work. I like the features of mapmyride better but it seems to always lock up at work. With mapmyride it will create the turn by turn directions for you whereas you have to enter them by hand in Bikely. Another annoyance of Bikely is that I have to do a password recovery every time I need to get to my routes. It does not matter what computer or browser or password, when I go to login it says that my password is wrong. I have searched for others complaining about this problem but have not found anyone else with the problem.

MyCyclingLog -- log your rides and obsess on the numbers

I often laugh at myself that I probably ride 30% of my miles because I am trying to beat some personal record or goal. But hey, whatever gets you out and riding, right?

It also has a section to enter your bikes and track your maintainence. This is great for seeing how many miles you have on a set of pedals or whatever.

Google Maps -- Bikely uses Google maps but there are features that it does not like the terrain and street view. These are great tools to see what hills you are climbing or if lazy like me, find a less steep route. Street view, if available in the area that you are riding, can be used to show if a street has bike lanes, where there might be bike racks and such. Also, with a custom map, I can track which roads I have ridden to make it easier to find an unexplored one.

Twitter -- let people know where you disappeared to

Using Twitter I can post my route and at rest points update how far along I am. This way if I dont turn up home, my SO knows where to look for me. In case I get tired, pull a stupid and ride off the road into a ditch or something. Or answer the 'when you gonna be home?' question.

BicycleTutor -- Maintenance How-Tos in video format

This guy is great and has made a series of videos of hot to perform maintaince on your bike in an easy to follow manner.

Sheldon Brown -- Bike Info God

No list would be complete without a nod to the late Sheldon Brown. Here you can find answers to so many of your cycling questions.

Anyone else have a good web site that helps them?

Price of old data

Last night the weather was very mild for late July (65 degrees) and begged an after work ride. I also needed some miles to break 700 ridden in a month. Using a book from the library Best Bike Rides Around Portland, I picked a route that looked interesting

The route was modified to originate and end at my front door plus on route I decided to reverse the ride so that the nicest part would be saved for last.

The first half of my ride would go down the Springwater Corridor and then skirt Clackamas to the west down to High Rocks area of Gladstone. The book referred to a pedestrian bridge over the Clackamas River that looked excellent. The ride to get to the bridge was not as near as I anticipated. Mostly the shoulders were wide and the pavement good.

The problem arose when I got to the bridge and it was barricaded off for 'repairs'. So much for the nice half of the ride. I asked a woman walking past and she said the bridge had been closed for years.

That is what I get for not checking the info from a book written 17 years ago.

As I rode the Springwater Corridor trail on an aluminum frame bike I once again steamed about the terrible paving. Was this thing terrible from the beginning or did it decay to this terrible state over time? If it was bad from the start, how did it get approved? If it went to garbage over time, why was the contractor not sued to fix it? In my opinion there is some corruption or incompotence in the Portland City Hall regarding roads and paving.

Overall the ride was good and it put me 40 miles closer to my mileage goal.

Setting goals

Goals seem to be a great motivator for me. I am so goal driven that I create goals when there is no need to. Here are 3 related to cycling that I am working on.

1. Ride every rural through road in Western Lewis County. I have informally added all of Lewis County and Cowlitz and Thurston to that list since I am getting close to meeting my goal.
Below is a Google custom map that tracks this goal.


View Larger Map


2. Ride over 5,000 miles this year.
mycyclinglog.com has a goals section where you can set a goal and track the progress.
Here is mine so far.

2008 5K
5000.00 mi between Tue, Jan 1, 2008 and Wed, Dec 31, 2008
[All]
Progress: 64%
3204.73 mi at 12.80 mi/h
A distance of 1795.27 mi remains. At current average speed, 140.3 hours of ride time required. An average daily distance of 11.22 mi required. You should have completed a distance of 2827.87 mi by today.

3. Monthly mileage goals.
I set a goal every month for distance.
The distance goals often get me on the bike for no other reason than to rack up some more miles towards my goal. Heaven forbid, that I should every get behind on one.

The goals also spice up riding, they add an extra feeling of accomplishment. Now, if I could convince myself to set a weight loss goal....

Chehalis to Gresham (CTG)

I decided to go ahead with the ride. My desire to ride it was greater than my distaste for the STP.

Group rides are not my thing and such a large group ride is even less interesting to me. I prefer just tooling along and getting lost in the surroundings and stopping when I feel like stopping. Having a constant stream of cyclists deters my enjoyment since I have to pay close attention to the road and the other cyclists. Stopping becomes more complicated, is the stop mobbed with people, are there lines for the bathroom. Starting is complicated too, you have to time your start. Even riding is harder, there were many times where someone would pass me and slow down or pull out in front of my and break my rhythm.

 

The weather forecast was for 90 plus temperatures. I decided to make an early start of the ride to beat the heat and if possible get ahead of the pack of riders (at least for a while). I started out at 5:07 AM, with 46 degree temperatures. I began the ride just wearing, sandals, shorts and a sleeveless and got pretty cold. Temperatures were going to climb soon so it was not a big deal. The route took my usual south plan to cross I-5 on park. On Meier Road I came upon a fresh deer carcass with a large vulture standing over it. I tried to get a pic of it with my iPhone camera but the vulture would not let me get THAT close.

Exploring Military road was part of the route. I was not expecting it to be very nice but was well pleased with the southern half. Lots of nice wooded sections and ridge views. I will have to work in more routes that include S Military Rd.

At the intersection with SR 506, my route combined with the STP route. One of the first bikes I encountered was a tandem with a radio attached to it. Fortunately, after passing them, I did not see them again and nobody else had a radio. Riding SR 411 with all those other riders was not my idea of fun at all, the previous time riding it was way nicer.

Surprisingly, then I got to Riverside park in Kelso, I was expecting to wait in line for the restroom and deal with the mobs but they were all herded into the south part of the park and I had the north side to myself.

Continuing on, the bridge crossing was tough because it was single file and I did not want to hold the people behind me up so I pushed harder than I wanted to. On the other side the tailwinds were blowing pretty good so it was easy to rest and ride. The pace really picked up and I sailed along at about 17 mph average for the next 30 miles with a stop at Prescott Beach park to eat lunch and fill water bottles. I had the park to myself.

After Scapoose, the tailwind died, the heat was in full swing and the terrain got a little bit more hilly. Combined with it being near the end, riders started to really slow down and many were on the wayside. I slowed my pace and stopped to make sure I was still sweating (not dehydrated).

Once on the edge of Portland, there is a tap by City of Portland, I filled up on water, wet down my head and set out. Most of the final approach is downhill or flat and I blazed into town.

Finishing time for 100 miles was 6:54 riding time and 8:01 clock time.

The final 11 miles to my apt I took real slow and stopped to hang out in a shady park and get dinner.

I arrived at 3:36.

Up to Oly for a BBQ

On Saturday, I rode up to Oly for a Barbeque at Alx's sisters house. This ride was unremarkable except for 2 things.

The Thurston County portion of SR 507 was just chip and sealed. It is amazing how much extra soreness gets transferred to your rear end, riding on this kind of surface.

 

The main the to remark upon is this was STP (Seattle to Portland) weekend and there were 10,000 riders heading south while I was heading north. I grew quite tired of hearing "Your going the wrong way". I was annoyed seeing them ride 4 abreast and block traffic which turns motorists into anti-cyclists. I was vexed to see lots of 'energy' product packets discarded on the roads and paths.

Worst of all though, was riding north on the  Tenino-Yelm bike path upstream of them.

They took over the whole thing, as if being in the STP entitled them to take everyone else's use of the facilities. I vowed to avoid the STP route on the ride weekend next year. Kinda ironic that it is bikes that would keep me off the road and not cars.

Once I turned off onto the Chehalis Western bike path, I was so relieved and the ride enjoyment shot up and my stress started to dissipate. Being around the STP riders was bad enough that I contemplated cancelling my planned ride to Gresham the next day since it was traversing the route of STP most of the way.