Rebecca and I decided for training to ride some hills this weekend.   The only hill nearby is the Kemah Bridge, so we rode over there and climbed up the bridge ten times.  Using my new Garmin Edge 350 device, I recorded the GPS, elevation, cadence, and heart rate data for the session.  The plot here from the Garmin Training Center software reveals, if taken at face value, that the bridge rose nearly 18 feet while we were riding.  And the elevation of our house dropped 16 feet while we were out.  The bridge is advertised by the state department of transportation to be 140 feet tall, but while we were there it reached only 77 feet.  

 

Obviously, the barometric pressure sensor in these devices is not a dependable proxy for altitude.  I wonder why they don’t use the GPS version of altitude.  The Garmin device tracks much better than my Lessen logger, and does not appear to slew off track.  Given the patch antenna on the former is much smaller than what I’ve been using on the previous logger, I’ll have to say I’m impressed with the Edge’s accuracy.  

 

The GTC software is not especially hot.  The most useful activity it supports is planning workouts and uploading the plan and alerts to the device.  For analysis of the session it is fairly weak.   I mentioned earlier using Ascent, which is much more Mac-friendly and useful for analysis.  The data is the same of course.   Below is what 10 laps of dogbone turnarounds looks like.