Liz Randall's Cycling Blog - a life behind bars

"With ordinary talents and extraordinary perseverance, all things are attainable"



Tuesday 13 May 2008

Winter Training

Ah! winter, when the scream of agony as you put cold HRM strap onto warm body is what wakes the rest of the family up in the wee hours and when you have to toss up between getting up at 4am in order to get to the indoor velodrome for training before work or wait til the evening and saddle up to train in front of the TV, wishing you had more DVD's to watch.....not sure which is worse really....

Today it was the velodrome, and while I *thought* I'd planned everything down to the last bit of equipment, clearly I hadn't. I'd got my HRM strap on, but forgot the watch and had my powertap CPU, but nothing else!! Doh! what a dipstick..

However, I did have one piece of equipment (an ebay purchase) to use and in fact use for the first time, a Chrono Sportscount Stopwatch. This little gizmo is a stopwatch you wear on your finger; there are 4 models and I chose to get the most expensive since it would give me a count back of 100 lap times and it's a little ripper for those of us doomed to do many many laps while all alone on the track at 0630, well at any time actually.

How to use it?
Easy peasy..you wear it on your index finger and press the button with your thumb , then a few seconds later you can glance down and get your lap time.


Why is it better than a wrist or stopwatch on a lanyard?
Since it sits on your index finger, its dead easy no reaching and its a single handed event. One proviso...great if you're using pursuit bars, but not so easy with standard bars. Much later you can scroll through all the laps and write down the results.

So what with that and the BT ergo (sadly only when I visit M Lash..they cost $2500 new and there are NO 2nd hand ones around) I'm set for a few months of REALLY fun winter training.

2 comments:

Rich Gift Of Lins said...

That made me smile, it would be a major disaster if I couldn't download my wattages! Strange to think of winter, we have just had our first warm days of spring and nice long evenings riding around the lanes.

Liz said...

Ah! Powertap..what started off as *hopefully* a good purchase has turned into a *total* must have/can't do without/even race with.

When you get to that point you know the mega bucks you parted with are totally justified.

However, since I wont race important races with it, even days like yesterday working on PE, have their uses.....albeit not planned that way.

Re: weather..I whinge alot, but our winters are nowhere near as bad as in UK..its all relative.