I’m a numbers guy; I want to know how much or how little everything I do is. When I drive, I watch my MPG, when I workout I track my calories and heart-rate. When I first started biking, I would head out for 20-30 minutes and turn around. I had no idea how far I was going, nor how fast. This wasn’t acceptable for me… I needed the numbers.
Eventually, I started looking up sites like MapMyRide, which has a pretty good mapping system to let you put in your route and it will tell you how far you went. The problem with MapMyRide is that if you didn’t turn around at a huge landmark then you might not get an accurate distance and therefore your speed will be inaccurate.
Then I switched to an iPhone app; trying both MapMyRide and Cyclemeter. For me, Cyclemeter was the better choice. The free version of MapMyRide drove me crazy and I had already paid for Cyclemeter, but also the accuracy of Cyclemeter seemed much better. Granted, this was more than a year ago that I ran the comparison, so there have probably been improvements for MapMyRide, but Cyclemeter hasn’t been resting on it’s laurels either.
MapMyRide.com is great for planning a route and seems to have a very strong community, something Cyclemeter doesn’t have. However, for me, Cyclemeter has always been the best app to ride with.
It’s simple to use and fairly accurate. When you want to start a ride you can either select a previous route and press start or you can start a new one and name it later. Then you just store it in your bike bag and forget about it until the end of the ride. If you want, it will give you voice updates and regular intervals, but I tend to turn on Pandora while I ride for some music. Safety Note: if you are going to listen to music while riding with traffic, I highly recommend only wearing one ear-bud…it’s vitally important to be able to hear the cars around you.
When you finish your ride, just pull up the app and press stop. It will give you an option to continue or you can select done. Through it’s settings you can tell it where to post your data when you finish your ride. I post my rides to facebook, twitter and dailymile.com.
Daily Mile is a great website. If you’ve ever used the Nike+ website, it’s very similar, but without the strong community. It allows you to pull up the rides you’ve logged and see all of the vital stats you could want. It will even calculate how many donuts you’ve burned, or how many televisions you’ve powered with your riding, but the veracity of these calculations is not revealed and I find them to be more of an intrigue than an actual real stat to worry about.
I wish the Daily Mile website had the same community that Nike+ does, because when I was trying to get into running, I absolutely loved Nike+. However, they are being slow to accept cyclists. They have an app that could be used for cycling, but there is no designation that you are riding instead of running. If they ever add that functionality to their app and their website, I will have to reconsider my choice of tracking tools. For now though, I recommend spending a few bucks for the Cyclemeter app and signing up for free accounts with MapMyRide and Daily Mile. You’ll love all of the stats you have access to and you’ll be able to watch as your rides improve.