I left work early and had plenty of time to do the remaining 45 miles to my monthly target, but a strong-ish wind from the west robbed me of the motivation. Nonetheless I wanted to make some decent progress at least, so I propelled the X round a fairly standard Twycrosser of 31.67 miles’ distance.
A bit annoying when riding into the wind but enjoyable when it was pushing me along, especially when the sun was out. Listened to the Drive programme on 5 Live, which reported on the PM’s initiative to get overweight people cycling. About 20 minutes later I saw possibly the fattest cyclist I’ve ever seen in proper cycling gear, standing talking to another cyclist near Bosworth Marina. I hope he’ll be getting out on his bike a bit more often.
I trialled another new bit of equipment on this ride, a Xoss G GPS bike computer that I bought on Amazon last week for £26.99. Now admittedly another GPS device was the last thing I needed, but I like trying new gadgets and at that price I couldn’t resist. And although I’ve been stung in the past by unreliable cheap stuff that ended up in the bin, I did a bit of research on this and it seemed to be a decent product.
Certainly, it worked well today – easy and straightforward to use, the screen is nice and clear, it synced over Bluetooth without a problem and the app uploaded the activity to Strava without fuss.
Whether it actually has the claimed 25 hour battery life while tracking I don’t know but the battery indicator was still reading a full four bars after nearly 3 hours. Perhaps best of all it came with two Garmin mounts and I was after another couple anyway for my Edge (which would probably have cost more than £10 in any case). One of them is a typical plastic mount that attaches with two rubber straps but the other one is a very solid metal unit, designed to bolt onto your stem faceplate. No brainer.