Re-Connecting

With a 24-mile road ride on Saturday and a 27-mile road ride today, this weekend I rode on consecutive days for the first time since Nov. 24-25. We’re not getting consistently nice weather, but we are getting good days just often enough to keep cabin fever in check. Normal for this time of year is 29° but Saturday’s high was 32° and today we topped 40° for the first time this month. Bright sunshine more than made up for the wind, which in general was higher than I would have liked and sometimes hit me with gusts up to 23 mph. In the new year I was a solo rider until today; training partner Jeff Wren joined me for 22 of those 27 miles. We had not seen each other in weeks.

I can’t complain about very much today, but I will complain about this: when I got home from my ride Garmin Connect was down. I rely on the site to sort out my ride stats. I upload the FIT file from my portable GPS device and Garmin Connect shows me a map of my route and all sorts of other information. Websites go up and down all the time but Garmin Connect is usually pretty solid. Today I didn’t feel like waiting for the service to be restored, so I tried to crack open the FIT file with a text editor. Unreadable. OK … what does Google say about FIT file editors? As it turns out, there are several choices for third-party software. I went with this one, which is free of charge, downloads and installs quickly, and gets the job done. The map gives a color-coded view of where I was faster or slower. I can see where I reached my top speed, and clicking on the red dot at the end of the route shows a summary of the entire ride. Not a bad little “emergency” backup for Garmin Connect.