Monday, August 9, 2010

Ram's Head for Dinner + Garmin Goals

Yesterday I had one of my good buds come down for a biking trip. He showed up around 3pm with his brother's beat up old mountain bike (a nice mountain bike... just old... and beat up) and we took off down to Annapolis. I rode my mountain bike as well. Not too much to report on the trip... we ate at a great little restaurant called Ram's Head, where we were able to sit out front with our bikes. We also did a short little tour of Annapolis... down by the city docks, around State Circle then church circle. All in all it was a great day.

Unfortunately I didn't turn off my gps until about 2 hours after I got home... so that is why the 2 and change trip reads at over 4 hours.


And as I mentioned in a previous post, I am using "Garmin Goals" to track both Phil's August 150 challenge and my own August 400 challenge.

Doing this is really simple...yet a bit underdeveloped. You go to Garmin Connect, click on Goals, click on New Goals, and then you get a bunch of drop down menus. Name of Goal? Activity Type (Cycling, Mountain biking, running, etc.)? Goal Type (Hours, Distance, Frequency, Calories)? Value of Goal (you put a number in... so for the August 150, I selected Distance then wrote in 150)? And then how long for you to reach your goal.

After that, any time you upload your gps files to Garmin Connect, your goal sheet automatically gets updated. See below for my progress.



Now there are a few problems I have with this program. First, you can not create goals for the past. So, for example, I started goal tracking the August 150 on August 3rd. It would not let me select August 1st for the start date, which means it wouldn't include the 10 mile mountain bike ride I did on Aug 2. Not really that big of a deal... but I can see it pissing off a person that rode a century on the first before making the goal.

Now the cool thing is it shows you "where you should be".

That is on the Dashboard of Garmin Connect. Basically all it is doing is dividing my goal by the number of days to complete the goal and drawing a line, but it does kinda motivate you to ride a bit everyday to make sure you are ahead. Surprisingly, I am almost at that line for my August 400.

5 comments:

  1. Ram's Head = VERY GOOD Locally brewed beer!

    I also find that goal tracker on GC very helpful.

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  2. Haha yea, we each had their Tavern Ale which was delicious. I used to go there weekly for happy hour last year to listen to the music on the back deck.

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  3. Mate theres no need to be embarassed about it - 4.5 hours to do 30 miles is still very respectable :)

    That Garmin site looks great - its a shame Satmap dont do something similar. Well they kind of do but you have to pay extra for it.

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  4. Haha. As for the Garmin Connect site... if your Satmap exports gps files, you can upload them to the garmin connect site manually. I don't think there is any requirement to own a garmin product to use it.

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  5. Good blog mate I had edge 205 that I bought of ebay so have been using that never realy used goals, now I have just bought the Edge 500, realy happy with it you have inspired me to use goals.

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