Changes for the season of cycling!

 New cycling season. New cycling stuff.

I have been a home body with more running inside on my treadmill and not so much going out of the house. I don't know what it is with this recent winter but I do not want to be cold for even a second in the morning anymore. I do not mind the cold normally and I have a fat bike to go riding in the snow but something has changed inside of me that just can not get with it to ride in the cold. 

Today was not much of an exception except I got a new toy I really wanted to play with and I can not go cycling mid day becuase I have a full time job so I got dressed and put my new toy on the bike. 

Its the bike computer in the picture. I will say I did not spend a lot of money on this bike computer and really just wanted to have it for the speed to be displayed as I ride. It offers a lot more than that such as syncing to Strava with a phone app. Lucky for me I have a very old phone that is not tied to any or my real accounts so I did test it out for those features and it works but its very clearly a 25 dollar it works. 

The listing and the instructions both say you have to update right after getting it or there might be issues where things will not load properly. Well yes that very true out of the box it was not working right at all. Things were locked after they loaded like the time and trip time. So I had to update and the app was a pain to use but I got it there. After the update everything works just fine but trying to get the data to sync to the phone was a very big question. The instructions said when it connects you can download the ride data. Very cool except when it connected there were no rides listed even though I just went on one. It seemed like all the data was lost. Poking around I found a setting that was something like list code ride info and I figured might was well press it. Well that is where all the data is for you to download off the bike computer. The maps it has in the app are accurate and provided by open street maps and overall it worked but the date was off. 

The first image is on my ride and you can see the time stamp from my phone. The ride data is listed as 2 days before. You can see the time is correct on the bike computer in the photos and its not like I did anything to set it so I dont know how it got the date wrong. It also had two ghost rides of 0 miles after the ride? I would not trust this to be what I upload to strava for. I bought it for the speed data to be right on my bike instead of having it on my watch so I am still happy with this thing. I mean it was 25 dollars and it does all the things listed even if they are a bit hard to find and wonkey. 

I am going to enjoy trying to push myself once the weather gets warming in the morning and see where my slow spots are and go faster around the whole ride. This will not be an every ride kind of thing because I really enjoy cycling for the view and being out there but part of the journey is to push myself. 

More cycling new stuff

I have been taking my kids cycling for a while now and my daughter out grew the charriot. I love riding with my kids and they both have enjoyed the rides as well but having one kid out grow the charroit last year meant I knew I had to do something for this year. I was debating on a few options and the better options seemed to be buy a half bike that attaches to your seat post solution. As it so happens one of the youtubers I sometimes watch kevcentral did a review of the mendham bikes buddy bike. He offered a coupon code for it in the video and it was already cheaper than the awful looking ones on amazon or the very costly ones at the bike shop so I figured I would buy it. 

This picture is a mess but I had all that cardbord down so that I did not scratch the paint of this when setting things up. Shipping for this was quick and its fairly well made. It folds up and removing it from the seat post is very easy with one clamp holding it in place. The back fender does leave a lot to be desired. Mainly its very cheap and I had to bend it up to get it to stop rubbing the tire. It has stayed in the up position so there is no more rubbing but its very clearly cheap. 

After putting it together I took the kids on our first family ride. That is when the other issue showed up that I really should have seen prior but did not notice. The wheel is not even close to true. I expected it to be a bit off but this is a noticable wobble when we were on the test ride. I have not been able to true the wheel perfectly either. Its not bent I just don't really do a lot of that so its out of my wheelhouse. 

Even though its cheap and there are some minor problems my daughter LOVES it. She was so very happy to get out there with us and was helping push forward so that we could win the race. There was no race but we had to go faster so that we did win the race! We are going to get a lot of use out of this thing and if I have to take it to the bike shop to really true the wheel so be it. That coupon code and mendham bike being cheaper saved me around 100 dollars so I am happy to spend a little money bringing it to the shop. If your wondering why I would not buy one of these type of things from the shop itself the cheapest one they had was 499.99 and this one from mendham 160.00 with shipping, taxes, and what not. I can not wait to ride with my kids agian once the weather gets nicer out and maybe I will find some people to "race" with to make my kid happy. 

Anyway I am off to continue the journey inside and pretending I am outside in the warm sun instead of on a treadmill in a cold basement. Have a wonderfull day and thank you very much for reading.