Ride for the Roses

The Ride for the Roses is the Lance Armstrong Foundation's annual charity bike ride here in Austin. This year, I've decided to ride the longest distance - 100 miles (161 km). Riding 100 miles in one day is referred to as a "century" in the cycling community. I've never ridden a century before, so this will require some training. I've put together a training schedule and I'll share that here in a future post.

To help with my training, I've purchased perhaps the coolest cycling toy ever. It's a small GPS receiver (Garmin Forerunner 301) with a built-in heart rate monitor. Using this, you can record all your training data, and refer to it to track your progress as you train. I then found the web site, MotionBased.com. This site allows users to post their training data, and plots the GPS data from your ride onto maps and satellite images. It's pretty darn cool. You can even share your ride information with others. For an example, click here to see my data from last night's training ride. Be sure to click on the "Map Player" tab on the top-right of the page. This will replay my ride on top of any map of your choosing (you might need to install some Adobe software to actually see it).