I took my Marin Bear Valley SE mountain bike out this morning and rode around eastern Mercer and southern Middlesex counties for an hour and 45 minutes in order to test the Garmin Forerunner 201, a Global Positioning System-based fitness measurement tool. I had a great time.
In order to make the Forerunner 201’s output easier for Operation Gadget readers to visualize, I created a breadcrumb trail over a satellite map of the area. I did this by following the excellent howto article written by Phillip Torreone.
I want to go into some detail about the ride and the work I had to do in order to make the images that you see in this article. I think you’ll be interested in the processes.
[ courtesy of Yahoo! Maps ]
The Ride
I took off from my driveway in East Windsor, NJ and rode northwest along Princeton-Hightstown Road which becomes Washington Road as it crosses US Route 1. After about 7.5 miles of riding, I hit an entrance to the Delaware and Raritan Canal State Park. This is a linear park that runs between Trenton and New Brunswick, NJ. I rode northeast on the canal towpath trail for 3.3 miles until I hit NJ Route 27.
From there, I rode through Kingston (a village in South Brunswick Township), and back out to US Route 1 along Ridge Road. I crossed Route 1, went around the back of the Dow Jones office complex, and turned on to Schalks Crossing Road, which leads into Plainsboro.
I turned left onto Scudders Mill Road and rode all the way out to Main Street in Cranbury. I turned right and rode through downtown Cranbury. At the southern end of Main Street, I turned right on to Old Trenton Road and rode 3.6 miles back to East Windsor.
When I got back home, the Garmin Forerunner told me I had ridden 23.5 miles in 1 hour 42 minutes and 24 seconds.
By the way, if you click on either of the map images, your browser will show you a larger version of the same map.
Mapping the Ride
As I said earlier, I was only able to make the ride map because I followed the directions Phillip Torreone provided in his howto article that was published on Engadget. I don’t think I would have realized that this was possible on my own.
I downloaded a copy of USAPhotoMaps and ran into a problem: the latest build that Don Cox had compiled hadn’t linked all of it’s resources properly, so the choice to import data from the Garmin Forerunner Logbook application was missing.
I e-mailed Don and reported the problem. Within 90 minutes, he responded with a fix.
The next problem I ran into was a little harder to deal with. Due to the constraints of the image data provided by the U.S. Geological Survey, the distance that I rode, and my PC’s limited video RAM, I wasn’t able to get the entire map to fit on my PC’s screen at 16 meters per pixel. I had to reduce the resolution to 32 m/pixel in order to get the entire ride comfortably on my screen at 1024 x 768. That’s why the ride map that I posted is relatively small.
I transferred the JPEG that was created by USAPhotoMaps to my Linux machine and used The GIMP to add text labels showing the names of the towns. I could have added labels for “Lake Carnegie” and various highways, but I had to stop somewhere.
Conclusion
Using the Garmin Forerunner 201 is a lot more fun than I expected. I am probably going to use it in conjunction with my Polar S-720i, because the Forerunner doesn’t do a few things I want, like:
- heart rate monitoring,
- fairly accurate caloric expenditure measurement, and
- cycling cadence measurement.
I’m going to get into the strengths of each gadget in a comparitive article that I will publish here soon.
The Garmin Forerunner 201 is a great fitness measurement gadget. I’d strongly recommend it for use while walking, running, cycling, and inline skating.