Friday, September 16, 2005

On the road to Diablo

In preparation for my upcoming race up Mt. Diablo, I have been given the opportunity to use a new training device, made by Cambiatta. It is a little electronic device that I carry in my pocket during a ride, which supposedly gathers data about speed, cadence, and heart rate during the ride. Then it syncs with my PC and I can store all kinds of information about my ride. So I set it up today, and went out for a quick spin through Fremont.
SInce I didn't have much time, it was to be a short ride, so I hit it pretty hard. two quick one-minute efforts at above 90% effort to warm up, and then gentle spinning for a couple miles. The one bad thing about this Cambiatta device, is there is no display - it just absorbs data, but I have no idea if it is on or off. There's one big button to push, but the feedback is either a beep, or a light flashes, or doesn't flash, or doesn't beep. So I dunno what's happening.
My ride lasted for about 50 minutes, and I kept my heart rate right at the aerobic threshold, sometimes going over just to strain my system. I focused on my breathing and saddle position, to try to find the right place to sit and get power without tiring out my legs and arms. I have about 4 positions on the saddle to mix up the leg muscle groups I use. That keeps me fresh and able to sustain close to my threshold for the whole sessionn.
To my dismay, when I got home, the Cambiatta had logged several rides, none of which were more than a minute long, and with no heart rate data. Apparently I had pushed that button too many times. I was so looking forward to re-living the ride through a chart or graph of some sort. But alas, such is the life of an early adopter. I'll try again on Sunday.
The first impression of the Cambiatta: Needs a better user feedback system.

1 Comments:

At 6:10 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

willis-

bummer, i'm sure you'll figure it out. thanks for the report.

 

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