40 Goals

Google Earth 5.2 has introduced some really cool features for cyclists. I've added an export to Google Earth option for Golden Cheetah and the really, really cool thing here, is you can mix power, cadence and heartrate data with the geo data when exporting. The libraries related to this are in the process of being updated by the Google developers, as soon as they're ready I'll be adding the option to export power, cadence et al. Over on the Google Lat Lon Blog they have published an interesting fly-over (which uses the new Tracks feature) - check back later for updates on getting this working with your data from GC !! I'm quite excited about this :-) And here is a portion of the London to Paris ride from last September with all my ride data available in Google Earth - funnily I can even remember that part of the ride, I was on the front pushing and Andrew was, um, coasting :-) We stopped for a pee just round the corner too... And of course, I can't leave thi...

I've been hacking around with data manipulation, fixing spikes and gaps in recordings et al, but came to the conclusion that a full-blown ride data editor is required. As a start, basic data editing is the order of the day, but before you know it I'll be joining, merging, sorting and enriching. This could become GoldenCheetah Excel 2010 before you know it... bloatware mansions on the case. And oh, yeah baby, we have anomaly detection out the box. Wiggly-red lines are us here at monkey island.... Golden Cheetah Ride Editor Demo from mark liversedge on Vimeo .

I have never believed any creator-myth, but this sign seems very, very apt.

More Graphing stuff, this time a user-definable 2d scatter plot. Above you will see the average effective pedal force vs Power. Col du Glandon at Marmotte is in blue and Alpe d'Huez is in red. What I'm slightly surprised to find is that the amount of force applied to the pedals is roughly the same when totally knackered (AdH) versus when I was still fresh (Glandon) ... albeit I was suffering from the off. Anyhoo, I'm working on a replay button (the time slider at the bottom) so you can watch how these things change over the course of the ride. This seems particularly interesting when looking at power/heartrate over a long ride (long enough for the 'lag' between CV response and effort to be nullified). Hey ho.

Web-services are us at Liversedge mansions, see attached screenshot. In my day job I spend lots of time bigging-up SOA and web-services. Its a bit of a let-down to realise they're just http posts with a bit of XML :-) I'm talking with the guys over at TrainingPeaks about pushing this into Golden Cheetah. Kinda cool, since I have all my old ride data there and would like to keep using their service...

Now I can mix metrics and my own metadata on the charts I can see that my weightloss last season tracked training intensity pretty closely, and that total work doesn't correlate at all. Of course, there are lots of other factors at play, but it makes for an interesting chart, and that's all that matters, eh? ;-)

I've been working on configurable data entry for recording additional information about my rides within Golden Cheetah. The screenshots above show the data entry on the main window followed by the configuration screen. It seems absurd to have a forms designed built into a cycling app, what next? an email editor? But, in reality, the basic config will be used by most users and then the geeks amongst us can start recording anything and everything we like. And hey, I spent 6 months cleaning up my MP3 tags to include composer, artist, sleeve notes, images etc. I can now do the same to my ride files. Yay! And yes, I am slightly OCD about this stuff ;-)

Damien Grauser, one of the developers on the Golden Cheetah project who brought us the superb intervals code has done it again. This time, he has delivered a feature that I *really* miss from WKO+. Stacked graphs allow you to examine really long rides in segments and makes the 'stochastic' view of power data much, much easier to review and examine. I kneel down in awe at Damien's super slick take on this. Wow. Non WKO-neophytes might not be too bothered, but for me, this is an absolute killer feature and I cannot wait for v1.4 of GC to get released with this in it. KILLER.

Greg Lonnon has added support to Golden Cheetah for overlaying rides on Google Maps. Major Kudos. He's working on using color etc to highlight different metrics over the ride. The above is my feeble power output color coded. Fortunately there is no legend yet so you can't see how pathetic I was :-)

Funny how this video makes me both pine to get back into form but also makes me baulk at the sheer pain... Nice video tho.

I rock! :-)

Update : A Windows installer for Golden Cheetah with Long term metrics support compiled in is available here. Well. Last year's Marmotte was a total disaster. 9 months later I'm beginning to accept that it was a result of a number of things. 1. My training dipped dramatically through June due to work pressures 2. I just didn't do enough (read any) L4 work 3. I'm not actually that great a cyclist The chart above is from some development I've been doing on plotting performance over time for Golden Cheetah. Kind of a back burner activity when I get some spare time. In it, you will see, that over all my training I spent almost no sustained efforts in L4 and camped at the top end of L3 for most of the time. You will also see that my performance plateaued from Feb onwards. So, more intensity required. Update : Here is my peak powers overlaid with time in zone for L3 and L4, you will also see the zones change as my FTP improves. Its kind of a pretty chart but the message i...

Well, it has become a bit of an obsession over the last 3 or 4 days, but the video above shows a new tool I've developed for visualising cycling power data in 3d. Well actually, its 3.5D because you can also use colour to visualise different data. Aw, and I forgot to show the grid, surface and arrows (normals) plot. I'm pretty pleased with the outcome but there are still a few bits of polish needed - gridlines would help enormously and a colour legend!

Inspired by thisisindexed.com (my new favourite website)...

Woohoo, Sean has announced the code has been accepted and pushed to the Golden Cheetah repository. So, in 2 months we went from the impossible to the possible and its done. Wow.

A 270k (!) patch to include this stuff in the Golden Cheetah codebase has been pushed across to Sean. Hopefully this will get released to the world soon. Really excited about it. In the meantime, here is a screenshot of it running on Linux. I wasn't pedalling at the time :-)

Wow. There is now a team of folks in the Golden Cheetah community developing some really cool and exciting new features. Justin in Montreal is getting ANT+ devices working so you can turn that tired old turbos or set of rollers into a Computrainer, I'm still mucking about with the Computrainer support and a few other odds and sods, and Steve in Seattle has the coup de grace, by adding a streaming server and support. The video below is our first proof of concept with streaming workouts via a specially built server. In it you will see Steve's Mac, running Golden Cheetah but reading telemetry from his server. I'm in Cranleigh riding my socks off on my Computrainer and sending my data over the Atlantic and across to the West Coast of America. As you can imagine, its all very exciting and we're already thinking of next steps, group rides, racing and who knows what else we can imagine. The killer here though is there is a lot of very, very clever folks working on this, incl...

Yep, we can now stream from any ANT+ device so Cinqos, SRM, Powertap and just about any of the new devices coming to market. Justin has done some awesome work as you'll see in the video below.