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There’s a lot of new stuff for bikes these days. By stuff I’m not referring to gears, brakes, etc. Not that those haven’t changed dramatically over the eons that I’ve been riding a bike, but basically, you get one more gear each year in your cluster but it’s still more or less the same thing.
I’m talking about gadgets, value added stuff to improve you or your bike. Take GPS for example. I, if anyone, am in dire need of such a system. Mostly, I don’t have a clue where I am, and have been known to get lost on my commute. There’s even an urban legend that I once rode by my house (I’m not corroborating that, mind you). The problem with GPS for me is that it looks a bit complicated. Put me behind the keyboard of a computer and I can work magic, but any other kind of electrical device confounds me. The misadventures with the TV remote are enough to deter me from dabbling in the mysteries of GPS, unless it comes with a native guide.
There seem to be a bunch of new gadgets dedicated to measuring your performance in one way or another. I was talking with someone who had what I guess can be described as a computer data system on his bike that cost more than my bike. The good one. In the old days, you could look at how fast you were going and your average speed. Bigger numbers are better. Now we have Watt meters, which measure your actual power output. Seems to me this correlates pretty well with average speed, but I guess it gives you another window on the same thing. Kind of like those bathroom scales that measure percent body fat in addition to weight. Now you have two independent assessments that you’re a tubbo. Reminds me of the old joke about the lady who goes to the doctor, who tells her she has some disease, she says “I’d like a second opinion.” He says, “and you’re ugly.”
I was reading one of the bike email lists, and someone was waxing eloquent about something called Bluetooth. Yes, I’m a computer geek and I should know what that was, but I didn’t. Anyway, the gist of it was that it was some sort of wireless communication device, and the author was postulating the day when his speed, cadence, and probably heart rate and percent body fat could be uploaded to the mother ship, and used for ... I guess you could burn a CD and stick it into your DVD player, fire up some popcorn, and you’ve got Saturday night covered.
I don’t mean to suggest that it’s not interesting to monitor your performance. When you’re in your youth, this is an exciting prospect, as each year you get better. At my advanced age, I am no longer, like Miss Jean Brodie, “in my prime.” At some point, all the technology in the world will only serve to document the fact that I am getting slower. So now I look for more optimistic metrics. Mileage for instance. I still do X miles, I just won’t tell you how long it took. When all else fails, go metric -- 100K sounds a lot more impressive than 62 miles.
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