A weekend of cycling to get some bugs out of the systems. I’m preparing myself for a multi-day cycle trip at the end of August and needed to see if the body could take multiple days of physical activities in excess of 100 km a day. At the same time, I also tested out some new toys that I’m taking with me on my multi-day cycle trip.
Saturday
My ride on Saturday the 8th August was randomly selected by the MapMyRide app – the app has a Route Genius feature were you just enter the distance you want to ride and then it randomly gives you a route. Below is the route I rode.
I like the Route Genius option of the MapMyRide app as it gives me routes that I have not thought about myself and also while biking the route, I get to see some new places in the Netherlands.
During the bike ride, I tested out the Blackview Hero 1 Action Camera with wifi connection to my mobile phone. With the LinkinEyes app, I can control the functions of the camera. It worked fine when I testing it in-house before the ride, out in the sunny weather it was a different story, it was hard to see the screen on the mobile, as you can see from the videos I took. The camera was attached to my bike helmet.
This bike ride was also a good opportunity to test multiple mobile apps and how they worked together and what range I got with the mobile phone battery. The other apps I used were HammerHead Bike Navigation and Wahoo Fitness App.
I used the Wahoo Fitness App to track my speed and cadence data that are sent from the Wahoo Bluetooth sensor attached to my bike. I also tested out the HammerHead Bike Navigation app that I use with the HammerHead navigation device attached to my handlebar.
To get the route from the MapMyRun app to the HammerHead Bike Navigation app – I downloaded the GPX details of the route from MapMyRide and uploaded it to the HammerHead Bike Navigation App.
At the end of the ride, I uploaded the distance, speed and time data from the Wahoo Fitness App to the MapMyRide.
I was surprised that the mobile phone battery held up all the way through the ride, I had two devices paired with Bluetooth and the GPS was on the whole ride, I also had a wifi connection on between the camera and the mobile phone. I’m happy with the battery performance.
I also tested nutritional intake during the ride, my plan was to see how I performed with mostly fluid intakes, all I took with me was a bar of dark chocolate, water, and sports drinks. It was enough nutrition for this ride, I felt fine after the ride and the next day.
Here is the youtube playlist for the videos I took on Saturday.
Sunday
On Sunday I went on my favourite ride in the Netherlands from Amsterdam to Vlissingen in the south, one of the biggest hurdles I have when I do this ride is to get Maassluis from Amsterdam, as I have to bike through a few cities and I always have problems with navigation through cities. For this ride I choose to use the route function of the HammerHead Bike Navigation app, it gave me a more direct and different route to Maassluis than what I have taken in the past.
I left home and let the HammerHead navigation device guide me to Maassluis – the route was a great option, I had my doubts sometimes on the HammerHead App suggestion on which side of a canal to cycle on as there were bike paths at some parts of the route on both side of a canal. I did get to Maassluis and from there after a ferry ride, it was straight down to Vlissingen.
For this ride I did not use the LinkinEyes app to control the Blackview Hero 1 Action Camera – I instead relied on pressing buttons to record. Here is the Youtube playlist:
On this ride I had much more food and drinks with me, I decide to eat every hour, that worked out great still had energy after the train ride from Vlissingen to Amsterdam Leyland Station to bike home. Overall I had a great weekend of cycling and I’m in good shape to do the multi-day cycling event at the end of August.
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