Spending money helps focus fitness

I don't know about you... but spending a little bit or sometimes a lot of money on bike stuff helps me regain fitness. In the past I used to say that everyone should get a new bike every year. There's something about a new ride that helps you get the juices flowing again. Well, after the kids started coming along, I had to start finding other reasons to get motivated. Then, I bought a Seven Axiom road bike. Now I don't have a reason to purchase a new bike. It rides just as nicely as it the day it arrived four years ago.

No, I didn't purchase a new bike. However, I did upgrade to the latest version of the iBike power meter. If you've read some of my early posts about the iBike, you will remember that there were good days and bad days. If you had the luxury of riding on silky smooth tarmac, things weren't too bad. But, if you had to ride on the roads in lower Alabama, you were out of luck. In the end, I knew when I could trust the numbers and when I couldn't. I had a training route that was fairly smooth and, provided that I was riding alone, I could do a good job of managing my power.

Enter the Generation III(my old model was a 1st gen that replaced a very early defective model). Over the past year, I had lost contact with the folks at Velocomp. Periodically, I would get the marketing emails that talked about new upgrades. Most of those went to the circular file. However, one day I decided to click the link from the email to the website. I started reading some of the new reviews. I went to the forum and began to read some other positive comments about the new product. As a late Christmas present to myself, I decided to upgrade. A week or so later, it arrived. The new sleek chassis looks cool and set up was pretty simple.

There is a calibration methodology that is a bit laborious but I recommend you follow it to the T if you want to get decent numbers. As soon as the calibration was complete, I headed out to one of the "bumpy" roads out in the county. This particular road would cause my old unit to show triple or quadruple wattage numbers compared to smooth roads. If you have worked with some of the power analysis software programs like Cyclingpeaks(or WKO+ or Trainingpeaks or what ever they are calling it today. By the way, what's up with all the name changes?) you know it causes a huge hassle and basically obliterates any trending data.

I digress... I headed out the the bumpy road and watched the power readings like a hawk. Here's the good news. THE NUMBERS WERE GOOD! What a wonderful experience. I was able to ride the entire bumpy road and match power to heart rate all the way. Good news for those individuals who don't want to spend $1500 on a power meter. The iBike is less than half that. If you want to go real cheap, you can get the iSport. It has the same guts but it's not down-loadable. At $199, it's not much more expensive than some of the nicer bike computers.

I haven't had the chance to ride in a group or ultrahigh speeds to see how it works in these situations. I'm hoping for good news here as well. I'll let you know how it goes.