Cycling stats from new Garmin watch

After getting pissed off at my watch when I first got it and how complicated it was to set up, I finally got past all that and just read the instructions and relented and installed the apps on my phone. I nearly bailed on the whole 'project' and even went back to the store to return the watch. They were in fact willing to accept the item for a refund, but before giving up they at least tried to show me how to set it up and this was a good sales tactic on their part because once they did all the heavy lifting for me that had me so confused, i realized that perhaps I was being a bit pissy and there was a lot of things that this watch could do that would impress me.

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There are a ton of activities that this thing can track but yesterday I took it out for my first bike ride yet to see the sort of stats that it could gather. Now there is no way for me to know if it is correct about my km/hr but I am just going to take their word for it.

This bicycle of mine is a slim-tired single gear "fixie" as it is called. I opted to not have gears because in the past the bikes that I had with tons of gears were always getting kind of screwed up with the derailleur and this would just piss me off as I struggled to stay in a gear. The area I am in is almost entirely flat and you are not going to be able to get up to really high speeds because of traffic anyway so a single gear just seemed like it was going to be more reliable. Less moving parts to have break.

You can tell by my 6 meters of incline that there isn't a lot of up and down going on over here.

I'm quite happy with BPM heartrate because at my age that is the "fat burning zone" as they sometimes refer to it. There have been some reports even by commenters here that the heart rate monitor isn't the best and gives inaccurate results but I think that if there was any exercise that I do where it would be accurate it would be from cycling since my arms remain stationary the entire time.

On the "more stats" page they really dive in to various aspects of the ride.

I am really excited about the calories burned if that can be trusted because I never really felt as though this exercise was particularly difficult. Compared to when I go running this was relatively easy and also hurt me a lot less as far as joint pain is concerned. I don't know how Garmin calculates this figure but if it is even remotely accurate, I am stoked about burning more than 600 calories in less than 50 minutes. Now as far as the sweat loss is concerned, I am a very sweaty person so I think I probably sweat a LOT more than 292ml :)

So far this is my favorite aspect of this watch and it stores all of the information in a calendar that you can look at over time. If you keep the watch on all the time it attempts to calculate how many calories you burn in a day and estimate how many calories you need to consume in order to continue to maintain or not gain weight.

I am putting a lot of faith into the technology but even if it is off by say 20% it is still a lot better of an estimate that I am going to get by just guessing, so this is a good thing.

I'm at the moment quite happy that I didn't return the watch and am looking forward to trying out all the other activities that are contained in it.