Bike Noob

This past Sunday morning, our club ride was making the transition from city streets to rural roads. The road got rougher as the scenery improved. It’s a road we ride often, so we didn’t think much about it — we just pumped away, and soon reached a Walgreens drug store in a small town where we always stop to regroup.

One rider who was with us for only the second time wasn’t there when we counted heads, so we waited. Eventually, he pulled up to the parking lot. We didn’t think he’d be that far behind, because he seemed to be a strong rider up to this point, but then he explained what had happened.

“My Garmin popped off,” he said. “Back where you make that curve across from the multi-colored condos.” He had stopped to look for it, to no avail. We agreed to go back that way, and help him try to find it.

On the return leg of our ride, he showed us where he thought he’d lost the unit. We dismounted, and walked along the road, trying to find a dark gray rectangular object amidst asphalt, weeds, and roadside trash.

“What are we looking for?” asked one rider.

“It’s a Garmin 205.”

“Oh, that looks something like this,” said another rider, pointing to the computer on his handlebars. The 205 is one of Garmin’s more basic units, measuring speed, distance, time, calories burned, and altitude, and the rider can transfer the data to his home computer. Still, it’s not cheap. Nashbar has them on sale now for $170. He said he bought his off Craigslist for $100.

We combed the roadside for about 10 minutes, but had no luck. Riders from other clubs, also coming back on that road, stopped to join the search. We still came up empty. The hapless rider told us to forget it. We commiserated with him over his rotten luck. He said it was okay, and he’d figure out what to do about it.

Later, at the post-ride gabfest, stories started surfacing about other lost Garmins. Three others indicated they’d heard of the same thing happening, and the blame fell to a chintzy handlebar mount. I suppose we’ll have to take the stories at their face value, since there’s no way to check them out, but it seems odd.

Why would a costly cycle computer be attached to a bike by a mount that doesn’t secure it? Have any of you had experiences with Garmins — or other brands of computer for that matter — popping off in mid-ride?

One of the rituals of biking I go through every time I come back from a ride is to unclip my cyclocomputer from its handlebar mount, and later enter all the data from that ride into an Excel spreadsheet I keep. I like to look at the data at intervals, to see if I’m actually making progress. Am I riding longer, farther, at a higher average speed?

I posted about my computer last year, after I put it on the bike. It’s a Cateye Strada Cadence, and I think it’s terrific. I’ve been most impressed by the accuracy of its mileage. It is a hard-wired computer, though, and the wires sometimes get in the way, especially when I’m mounting the bike on the car’s bike rack. I have a hunch that if I get a different computer at some point, it will be a wireless.

My previous computer was an Ascent Delta V. It was wireless, so was convenient. I liked the fact that I could “scan” the data, that is, it would display distance, average speed, top speed, elapsed time for a few seconds each, then advance to the next one. The Cateye doesn’t do that. No big deal.

I supposed the next step would be to move up to a GPS computer, like a Garmin 705. The bike routes I’ve seen displayed with Garmin data are pretty nifty. The expense of a GPS unit, however, is something the Noob household is not in a position to bear at the moment. So it’ll have to wait. Years, maybe.

What’s your preference? Is there a minimum set of functions each cyclocomputer should have? Or do we even need to care about the data they accumulate? And how much are you willing to spend to get that data?