For me, this was my second time to Bear Valley. The first time we camped up the road by Lake Alpine during the Bear Valley Triathlon. I didn’t participate in that tri, but my wife did. The area was gorgeous, and the cycling was awesome. I took a ride up to the Ski resort, up around 9000 feet. It was incredible, I didn’t even see one car that whole ride.

The second time we went to Bear Valley, we decided to do Ski trip. I don’t do downhill, because I don’t want to do anything that could impact my ability to ride my road bike. But cross-country skiing has some appeal for me. We stayed in the Lodge, which is super old school, but the great room is a fantastic place to just hang out and recover.

The first day we went out, it was about 60 degrees and sunny. I fell in love with it. I haven’t ever done any form of exercise that I liked anywhere near as much as cycling, but this gets close.

I was able to get my heart rate up to over 150 xc skiing for around 3 hours. It was an incredible workout. I pulled my son behind me in a Polk sled, it was fantastic. I can’t wait to do it again.

Bear Valley is a great place to to for an exercise vacation for the entire family. If you have kids, there is something there to challenge everyone.

In other news, the bug that is present in some competing GPS applications, where the phone will go to sleep mode after a text message, alert, or notification seems to be fixed via an odd workaround in CycleMetrics 1.1.4. It should no longer be necessary to turn off auto sleep before your rides anymore.

In current news, I’m working on getting the web application for CycleMetrics together, and will attempt to get more meaningful altitude data out of the iPhone with some algorithmic help, or some data if I can get my hands on it.

While this is useful data, I don’t think that my application is the best thing to determine tailored calorie burn data. I would strongly recommend “LoseIt” if you want that data. It is what I use for calorie and weight monitoring.

The other thing that I added was total elevation. For those who have been using the iPhone for a while, you are aware of the issues with getting accurate altitude data. You might not be able to get exact elevation gained on a short-flat ride, but if you are going for a hill ride, or doing some serious climbing you should get decent overall numbers. If you want to see how to get the best possible GPS tracking data while cycling, check out my earlier post on what to turn off to get perfect GPS tracking on your iPhone.

Other improvements are mainly in the area of power. Average, peak, and watts per kilo should have improved dramatically, and as a result the GPS accuracy should have improved due to the reduced stress on the CPU.

One issue is that I have renamed the Google Spreadsheet that CycleMetrics writes to, so you may have two files. I hope these updates improve CycleMetrics’ usefulness for you! Good riding!

The iPhone, and other phones, get a boost in speed by using the cellular network to get a rough location, and to download the locations of the satellites instead of trying to get it from the satellite network itself.  This is called aGPS, which is what the iPhone uses.

Another piece of information I discovered with a few friends a while back was that when the iPhone is either on a congested Wi-Fi network, or is hunting for Wi-Fi, in addition to draining the battery, the performance of the CPU is degraded, especially on 3D gaming.

Recently on my last ride, I put these things together and turned off 3G ( leaving EDGE on ), turned off Wi-Fi, in addition to disabling push notification and setting fetching for email to manual, turned off bluetooth, and disabled auto-lock.  This left my iPhone in a near airplane mode state.  After my ride, I reviewed the map and to my surprise all of the inaccuracies I was blaming on my iPhone having subpar GPS went away.  The tracking was perfect, the best I’ve seen as well as having fairly little battery consumption.  I’m not sure what impact 3G has on the CPU, but it is likely significant as I had done some of these other things in the past and not had such rock solid GPS tracking before.

I think I’ve found a new riding configuration, if only Apple would update the settings application to give me custom settings bundles so that I could drop it into my riding configuration with one tap.  Maybe for iPhone OS 4.0?

I was on one of my usual rides today, but I had left my bike in a higher gear than I usually ride. I decided to stay in the gear throughout my ride. What I found is that I dropped 0.2 watts per kilo, and was off about 40 watts from my typical average power output. It could be that it was cold, but I don’t think so. I have done that ride many, many times and I am typically at around 2 watts per kilo or a little better and 200 ~ 220 watts average. I dropped to 1.6 watts per kilo, and 175 average or so.

What I expected was a minor drop in watts per kilo and average, but what I didn’t expect was the magnitude of the drop in average and max output. On my next ride, I’ll drop into my usual gear and see how it compares. It is really cool to have access to all this data.

I have figured a way in which I can still bring my iPhone out in the rain and have it stay dry as a whistle. You may already know it, but a Ziplock baggie is your best friend in the wet winter months.

The baggie keeps the phone dry, make sure that you seal it and push out the air, and the best part is that you can still use it while it is in the bag. The screen is completely workable! Anyway, I hope this winter tip keeps you riding with your iPhone through the winter months, assuming the temperatures cooperate.

Basically when someone calls you during a ride, whether or not you answer the call it cancels the application’s call to tell the phone to stay awake. This is a bug in the iPhone OS 3.1.2 as best as I can tell.

When this happens, the ride data gets screwed up, your moving time and total time may, or may be generally correct, but the power and speed graphs will look nuts.

Whatever the case, the best workaround is to turn off “Auto Lock” in your settings on the iPhone under the general preferences section. The caveat is to turn it back on after you have finished your ride.

I’m hoping for a Juice Pack for Xmas so that I can extend my rides past 3:30 minutes, or the longest I’ve been able to ride before my stock 3GS battery dies.

I know with the weather out there it’s tough, but even in the cold it’s good to get out for a ride in the real world and leave the fluid trainer for when it’s particularly nasty out there.

Anyway, Good Riding!

Mostly the problem is distinguishing stopping from accelerating. Generally to the device they are the same, however I am going to start testing a fix that I hope will make the max power reading more accurate.

If you want to get the most accurate reading however, before I deploy the fix, here are a couple of tips.

1 ) When stopping, stop gradually ( I know that this is hard in urban riding )

2 ) At the end of your ride, when you are pulling your phone out of your jersey, bring it out slowly, so as to not create any power surges.

Hopefully I will have the fix out soon.

Happy Turkey Day!