I want to start using strava fitness and freshness, with an hr meter, however when racing I don’t record the ride (nowhere to put phone). This obviously means my fitness etc. will be out. I manually add the race, it would be good to be able to ‘invent’ and upload an hr trace to fit. Any ideas of a way to do this? While it wouldn’t be accurate it would be more representative of what I’m doing than a gap!

What sort of racing are you doing? There must be somewhere to stash your phone?
Otherwise get a bike computer with GPS to record your race. A computer would come in handy for training too.

Fitness & freshness?!

Sounds like an ad for Fabreeze!!

Garmin

Garmin.

Garmin

The discontinued Edge 500s are on at Halfords with a heart rate monitor for about £150. BC discount should take a few quid off that again

Garmin sounds like the answer.

Or, if you’re on a budget, a Holux GPSport 260 http://www.dx.com/p/holux-1-6-lcm-usb-rechargeable-bike-gpsport-260-pro-w-heart-rate-monitor-cadence-speed-sensor-73505?tc=GBP&gclid=CjwKEAjw0pa5BRCLmoKIx_HTh1wSJABk5F_4BrcFtmK7IyaW3hq1HacZiB3Wwjoj6KX1TCISX9-ddhoCtY7w_wcB#.VyYn4GnTXqA

Buy my garmin.

Garmin.

Simon – Member
What sort of racing are you doing? There must be somewhere to stash your phone?

Xc racing, for training I have a bike phone case on the stem but it’s big and heavy and I kind of think no point in having a light bike then adding extra weight of a big phone box, plus not that secure and have to adjust every so often, don’t want to be thinking about that on a race.

My jersey pockets aren’t secure enough, I guess I could safety pin it closed.

A garmin would be ideal but I don’t have the cash at the mo, we’re saving and race fees/petrol/b&b’s are an extravagance enough!

What one have you got Jam bo and how much do you want for it?

520

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/garmin-520-mio-fuse-hrm

Cool, don’t have that amount at the moment.good luck with the sale

Maybe look at getting a cheap jersey with a zipped rear pocket.

I’ve been using a Tom Tom Multisport GPS that was £99 from Sport Pursuit. Mine came with a Bluetooth HRM chest strap. It has a rubber bike mount that’s easy to swap between bikes and a wrist strap for running/swimming.
Uploads wirelessly via smartphone to Strava. Not sure how cheap you can get them now but Amazon have them for £99.95
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B00D7LNAX8/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?qid=1462130386&sr=8-3&pi=SY200_QL40&keywords=tom+tom+multisport&dpPl=1&dpID=41nrWTq5ibL&ref=plSrch

A garmin would be ideal but I don’t have the cash at the mo, we’re saving and race fees/petrol/b&b’s are an extravagance enough!

Camp

TrainingPeaks. You can manually stick a TSS value in for the ride that goes into your PMC.

Cool, don’t have that amount at the moment.good luck with the sale

No problem, weren’t aldi doing garmin 25’s for £75 recently?

I trick mine by never ever looking at it.
it’s just yet another pointless made up stat with no real value.

I’ve got a Garmin 500 that’s for sale – practically brand new. I got it fixed by Garmin and then bought an 800. Looking to recoup the fixing fee – so £75 with an HR strap?

Or I have one that the menu button is a bit dodgy. £25 for that one instead.

You could get one of those bicep strap holders that joggers use and strap it on tight under your jersey.

I’d never looked at that Strava feature before but it just confirms the way I’ve been feeling since mid March (lack of enthusiasm, no energy). I’m not sure if I can just snap myself out of it or there’s some underlying problem. 🙁
Best go for a ride and find out.

I quite like the F+F graph, find it very accurate when the fatigue is low and form is peaked to get in some good rides and hit lots of PRs

FWIW I find the fitness or TP CTL a misleading. They make no referance to quality and the algorythm counts long gash miles count more than high quality shorter sessions.

just emailed you schmiken.

adsh, I agree it can’t be that accurate, but at the same time I can’t help thinking it’ll be useful as a rough indicator. I imagine fatigue works better than fitness

The fatigue or TP TSB isn’t so bad but I find the fitness/CTL too easy to get into a panic at dropping ‘fitness’ and stick in a ho hum ride when actually Id be better off going into a very hard interval session the next day more rested.

Indeed, as someone on another forum pointed out, if it was all about CTL then audax riders would make brilliant testers.

There’s a guy on one of the TP blogs who has posted about Acute and Chronic Intensity load as a “fix” for this… hang on a sec.

Here you go

TO be honest my ‘training’ is all over the shop at the moment. I’ve been trying to replicate xc racing more in my intervals, either fire-road blasts, steep, slippery hill climbs or random things like this mornings interval of ~100m flat sprint, a 90deg turn and 50m steep uphill. While its more fun than turboing and I think is beneficial technically and probably for racing, I have a feeling from a pure fitness point of view its less good. I’m actually looking forward to having an 8 week block off in a month to get some structured training in 😕

I did just slip phone in back pocket tis morning and it was secure even going down a technical descent to my training ground so think if I safety pin it in will be fine, and means I can save buying a garmin!

edit. didnt see Beej’s post, makes me think my random intervals are useful 😆