David: December 2007 Archives

You've probably noticed the MapMyRide routes posted below... if you haven't tried out MapMyRide give it a whirl sometime; it has several nice features. Unfortunately one of those nice features is not getting accurate elevation data for your ride. Or, more precisely, the elevation data you get from MapMyRide may or may not be accurate, but is entirely insufficient for extracting grade information. The two main problems with MapMyRide are 1) if you use MapMyRide's nice "Follow roads" feature, then elevation changes aren't considered; your recorded routes will likely miss the bottom and top of a hill unless the route is exceptionally... curvey, and 2) worse, distance measurements saved to a CSV file are limited to .01 mile precision (52.8 feet). Which is fine for distance, but really bad for calculating % grade on the relatively short hills in this part of the country. Unfortunately the GPX file you can save with MapMyRide does not include elevation; if it did then this exercise would be pointless.

So I've been playing around with my Garmin GPS hoping for better results. Before you get too excited, this works better than MapMyRide but I'm not there yet. Though this isn't the answer, a few gearhead types might be interested in what I've done so far. Check it out. Comments welcome.