Color-coded Elevation of Routes in Google Earth

One of the reasons I was considering a GPS was to get a better picture of the elevation I was gaining on my rides around town. I've learned that most GPS aren't accurate enough to be useful so I looked for alternatives.

Since all my riding is on-road, I can easily create a track of my route using bikely.com, but the elevation information had some problems. Sometimes it wasn't available at all and when it was available, it wasn't always accurate. In any case, I couldn't export the elevation information to make corrections or perform calculations.

I recently learned about an online tool called GPS Visualizer. This has a set of tools that allow working with the tracks created in bikely.com. The result is Google Earth file that shows color-coded elevations along the route set against a 3D view of the earth's surface in reasonably good detail. The file JacksNicakjack.kmz covers the route we rode this past Sunday. Red is the lowest elevation and purple the highest. The ridge along Pebblebrook stands out nicely even without lowering the eye-level so you can see the hills.

I'll post other routes and the steps for creating these files in a later post.

Up the Creek without a Pedal

The name of this century ride grabs your attention. Riding these roads will bring you back.

I had ridden a portion of this route (Pocket Road) during the 2006 BRAG, and was happy to be revisiting these roads.

Pat, Jack, Charles, Larry, David and I stayed together most of the route. We were joined at various times by others who kept -- and often raised -- our pace. Even though we were riding alongside low mountain ridges the whole day, we only had one climb that really got us breathing hard. The flatness and the number of strong riders gave us a fast pace: we averaged 20.0 MPH over the 100 miles, and were getting faster as the day wore on.

When we finished and were checking our bike computers, Pat had guesstimated that we had finished the ride in a little over 5 hours. My computer recorded 5:00:02 -- two seconds over 5 hours.

Got to play with the Nuvi 200 GPS some. It is able to record tracks if you use version 3.40 of the firmware. There were two drawbacks to the device: 1) it only has a 4 hour battery life and 2) the touchscreen is easy to accidentally turn off your recording. The first limitation is more serious than the second if you're careful where the unit is placed.

I've mapped the century route in bikely.com.

GPS Consideration

I'm not a big gadget person. I recognize when I'm spending time with gadgets that don't further my other goals, and avoid the temptation.

My Treo is an example of something that walks the line. I needed a phone and I'd been carrying a Palm Pilot for contact and calendar, so it was nice to combine the two devices into a single hand-held. I'm also aware that it could make a pretty good GPS device with the addition of a Bluetooth GPS receiver.

Now, my odometer on the bike gives me most of what I need: distance and time. Routes I plan out using bikely.com. If I get lost, that just makes it more fun. So, having the maps in the device is not a big deal for me. Being able to track elevation would be nice. I can get a fairly good estimate from bikely.com routes, but I've also seen some inaccuracies. The GPS could give me a better picture of my climb and also would tie it to my speed on the various hills.

There's also the ability to track and then download to bikely.com so I wouldn't have to hand enter my routes.

So, the solution I was considering was the Visiontac VGPS-500 Bluetooth GPS for about $40, and a freeware app for the Treo called CotoGPS that captures tracks. There's also some analysis software that is available for the desktop.

I could substantially improve my data gathering capability for about the price of a bike computer.

Commute Summary

Round Trip Distance: 17.4
Number of Cyclists seen: 28
In-bound Route: Lullwater/PATH trail
Out-bound Route: Emory via Clifton
Weather: The best; cool in the morning and pleasantly warm in the afternoon.