Software to help cyclists get fit

Joseph Scully <[email hidden]> wrote:

: 1. Can anyone recommend a good road bike for a heavy guy (18 stone), but in
: the 'cheap' market, ie. sub £300 to start with.

You'll have to look to spend the full £300, but Dawes do a road bike in that
range.

The other option is to go second hand.

Bikes in this price range won't give you any problems with your weight since
they'll all be pretty solid (read heavy), with one exception. The wheels.
Buy your bike for a good shop and get them to re-tension the wheels. They
should do this for free if you buy the bike from them.

Arthur

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Joseph Scully said:

1. Can anyone recommend a good road bike for a heavy guy (18 stone), but in
the 'cheap' market, ie. sub £300 to start with.

You say "cheap" but your budget is realistic. Some people come here
looking for a decent bike for a hundred quid...

Sub £300 won't buy a very nice road bike, but you can get a decent
hybrid for that, which will most likely have a stronger frame than
a roadie anyway.

For example:

-- Dawes Discovery
-- Specialized Crossroads
-- Trek 7100

AFAIK all of the above come in different variants up to and probably
slightly above £300.

Also, the oft-quoted gotcha on this newsgroup - if £300 is your
*absolute maximum* then don't spend it all on the bike as you may
want a pump, lights, lock etc.

As for software, I can't really help, except to say a spreadsheet
is probably enough if you set yourself challenging but realistic
goals every week.

The best thing I can recommend is to set a target - enter the London
to Cambridge or some other organised ride later in the year and
work towards it. Check out http://www.bike-events.com/

--
jc

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Jeremy Collins <[email hidden]> wrote:

: Also, the oft-quoted gotcha on this newsgroup - if £300 is your
: *absolute maximum* then don't spend it all on the bike as you may
: want a pump, lights, lock etc.

Well, you'll need a pump but try for a discount on that when you get
the bike. You may not need the rest if all your are doing is fitness
riding

--
Arthur Clune PGP/GPG Key: http://www.clune.org/pubkey.txt
Don't get me wrong, perl is an OK operating system, but it lacks a
lightweight scripting language -- Walter Dnes

Jeremy Collins said:

Joseph Scully said:

1. Can anyone recommend a good road bike for a heavy guy (18 stone),
but in the 'cheap' market, ie. sub £300 to start with.

For example:

-- Trek 7100

I almost bought one of those a few days ago: it was 270 UKP. The guy in
the shop told me he wouldn't reccommend it, though, since it has a weak
rear hub (freewheel rather than cassette, i think, but i know sod all
about that sort of stuff); the next version up, the 7200, had a cassette,
plus a few other nicer bits, and was 340 UKP.

I went for a Trek 4300, a proper (albeit low-end) mountain bike, with
rigid forks and slicks, in the end. That was 270 too. It may not be as
fast, but the MTBish gear ratios means it accelerates faster, which is
probably more useful in London. The extra robustness doesn't hurt either,
and the extra mass is actually somewhat advantageous in view of my own
excess robustness ...

Quoted message said:

As for software, I can't really help, except to say a spreadsheet is
probably enough if you set yourself challenging but realistic goals
every week.

A spreadsheet is ideal, i'd say, or a text editor and a calculator!

tom

--
Get a bicycle. You will not regret it. If you live. -- Mark Twain

Tom Anderson of You've got to be kidding... said:

On Wed, 23 Mar 2005, Jeremy Collins wrote:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

As for software, I can't really help, except to say a spreadsheet is
probably enough if you set yourself challenging but realistic goals
every week.

A spreadsheet is ideal, i'd say, or a text editor and a calculator!

My workbook has one spreadsheet per year, and one for the current week.

Weekly sheet has columns for date, distance, time and average speed. One
row per day and one row with totals.

Yearly sheet has a row for each week. It has columns for date, distance,
average distance over the last 6 weeks, average speed and highest distance.
As well as a totals row it also has annual mileage and annual average weekly
mileage.

I fill in the weekly sheet every day by zeroing my computer first thing in
the morning then putting the end of day figures into my pocket pc. The
pocket pc syncs with my pc, which I use to transfer figures from the weekly
sheet to the yearly sheet at the end of each week, then clear the weekly
sheet.

OK, as a solution it's a bit over the top, but it works for me.
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