roadcx.net

So far, so good. My first on the road use of the Garmin 705 – FSA SRM wireless crank was Saturday morning at the Tour de Heart 32 mile RR over in Marion, Arkansas. The race played out pretty much the same way with David Lacek thundering off the front in full-TT tuck (as this was a non-USAC race, anything goes…as long as you had a helmet!). When he jumped off, the group of 30 or so was splintered apart chasing. We ended up with about 8-9 of us working in a rotating line for the remaining 13 miles or so. We did not catch him. I ended up 6th overall and 3rd in 30-39.

As for the SRM, I had some initial trouble since I did not put the cadence reference magnet initially. I figured it would work since the Garmin 705 had one. The cadence turned out to be needed (SRM measures torque and cadence. Their product is power). The Garmin includes a speed/cadence sensor along with a HRM strap. On the Tour de Heart, there wasn’t many issues with the speed reading. On my long Sunday ride (Cordova to Outdoors and back-75 miles), there were numerous speed spikes in the data file. I did some reading about that and there was talk about this problem on the internet. I upgraded the firmware to 2.4 (I didn’t check what it was before.., sorry). I will check it out tomorrow night, since tonight is Race #3 of Cyclocrunk.

On Monday night, Andrea and rode out to Shelby Farms to do a partial Tour de Wolf lap and some skills drilling. I pocketed the Garmin to see if would track me through the woods….

It did:

To test out the resolution… I tried to write my name in the field using the GPS track. I sort of worked… my writing is pretty bad…