Review of i-gotU GPS Travel Logger

When the folks that make the i-gotU GPS Travel Logger sent me an e-mail earlier this summer asking me to review their latest gadget…I happily said yes.  As many of you know, I love taking photos, enjoy travelling, and also have lots of fun GPS technology.  How could it get any better? (Yes, I suppose they could have send me on an all expense paid trip to Fiji…but…oh well).

So what does it do?  Well, think of it as a tiny little device that tracks where you are – so your pictures know where they were taken.  This is called geo-tagging – or the act of adding GPS information to digital images you’ve taken.  This allows you to then easily map them out visually as to exactly where every picture was taken.  You may remember I did this with lots of photos, on some of my Africa trips, but also with the Boston Marathon.

The challenge is that the vast majority of today’s cameras don’t have built-in GPS technology to do this for you.  So that’s where the Travel Logger comes in to make things easy.  It automatically corresponds the GPS ‘track’ that it stores with the pictures in your camera – and it does this by matching time stamps.

Devices itself:

So let’s talk about the pieces first:

First up is the little GPS logger itself, which is smaller than a tic-tac box:

(You may be wondering why I’d use a stock photo of the device instead of my own photo…well, read through the review for the sorta funny story about that…)

Then to connect it to your computer you use a USB cable that’s provided in the kit, again, fairly small:

Now, they also have a Bluetooth version that you can use to do it all wirelessly, but I find that sometimes keeping things simple is best.  And USB is about as simple as it gets.

In the field:

With that simplistic introduction, let’s get onto the action and start using it.  To turn it on you simply press and hold the main button for a brief moment, which turns it on and starts logging.  It’s pretty much that easy.

There aren’t any ‘options’ here to turn on or off.

At this point, you go and take a gazillion pictures using any digital camera you’d like.  The only requirement is that your camera have a functioning date/time on it.  It doesn’t actually even have to be the correct date/time as I found out.  Just has to be some date/time that can then be adjusted later on on the computer.  Once you’re done on your trip simply press the ‘Everything’ button again.

Back in the lab:

So you’ve gone out and taken a gazillion photos, sorta like this:

Then you connect up the GPS logger using the USB cable to the computer and start the software that’s included - @Trip.  The next step is to simply launch the import wizard, which will automatically grab the files from the little Travel Logger and copy them to your computer.

Now we get to pick which GPS track is the correct trip, and then get to name our trip with a name meaningful to us.

After that we’ll select a style for our display – because this was from a bike ride, I chose the most sporting style available…which…happened to be called ‘Sporting’:

Next up is probably the most important part – selecting all the photos we want to copy over.  It takes only a moment to inventory them all.

And then, it’s time to for the @Trip software to display some magic:

The software has now automatically overlaid all the photos directly onto my GPS track.

Further, it offers quite a bit of information along the bottom – like speeds, elevation, duration, distance, etc… Though, I did see some minor issues where the correct units (imperial or metric) weren’t quite sticking, I’m sure that’s a minor issue though they’ll work out.  Also note that it doesn’t account for stopped time in the averages, for example, below I stopped to fix my broken pedal for quite a while – which extended the actual time duration and averages.

It is cool how it’ll show you exactly how fast you were going when you took a given picture, along with the elevation.  Thus proving that I really don’t stop to take pictures on my ride. :)

Now, one challenge you might have is that your camera’s date is off – or that there was no date at all.  For example, about half-way through my ride, my camera decided it’s battery life was up.  But – I still had my cell camera.  So how do I integrate those photos too?  Well, I just added them to the track and then I can use the little slider to adjust either the location on the map to match, or the known time.

And you can batch a bunch of photos together.  For example, I have a number of different cameras I use (little Optio W60, DSLR Digital Rebel, older point and shoot, cell phone, etc…) – and all of them have slightly different timestamps.  This allows me to quickly adjust a large batch of photos.

Finally, we can share our trip on the web.  This allows me to share a trip…with you (or your other friends).

You can choose whether to share it using their service, or Picasa or Flickr, all of which support GeoTagging.  Let’s go ahead and use the service that came with it though, it has more features.

From there you can explore the trip and see all sorts of fun stuff, just like in the desktop version:

For example, you can enable 3D view and utilizing Google Earth display the pictures that way.  Here’s one I did back on the 4th of July using it:

And if you want – here’s my trip I did – you can explore it yourself by clicking here.  I made public both one I did earlier this summer on July 4th, and one from just two weekends ago.

One final cool feature that’s really useful to me…

Say…for example, that you go on a 120 mile ride.  And as part of that ride you’re using a device that’s completely hands-off – just one button and all, so you start the ride, set it, and forget it.  And say along that ride you manage to lose said little device that you’re reviewing (just hypothetical of course).  But, say you don’t realize that until you get back to your car (some 120 miles later) and can’t find it.  Well, if you were using another GPS based device to record your track – all is not lost.  the @Trip software can actually import from ANY GPS track, which rocks!  Especially in instances where said reviewer can’t figure out which cornfield the device might be in.  Just saying…

(And thus, explaining why I used a stock shot early on.  Normally when I write reviews I take photos before I ever get stuff out of the house – the Girl always laughs at my obsessive photo taking.  But in this case, the device came about an hour before I headed on a trip, so I took it with me without bothering to take the photos pre-trip earlier this summer, and thus by time I got around to needing to take the photos a few trips later…said device is resting somewhere in Maryland).

Summary:

In summary this is a fun little device if you want to cheaply geo-tag photos.  While you can use a number of different sport GPS devices (such as the Garmin’s), this device is bar far the quickest and easiest way I’ve done geotagging yet (and I’ve geotagged tens of thousands of photos from trips).

Pro’s:

- Hardware Simple to use
- Software is flexible, and simple to use
- Allows you to create standard GPX files, also import GPX files
- Relatively cheap (on Amazon for $69)

Con’s:

- Lights on display are really hard to see/read in bright light
- Easily losable in bike jersey pocket/hiking, needs some sort of string to attach
- While software is simple and efficient, it’s a bit clunky in some areas

As always, if you have any questions, I’d be happy to try and answer them.  Feel free to leave questions in the comments field below.

Thanks for reading!

2009 Chesapeake Man Aqua-Velo Race Report

The Chesapeake Man Ultra Triathlon is essentially a Ironman Distance Triathlon, but because World Triathlon Corporation (WTC) owns the naming rights to “Ironman”, these non-M-Dot races (referring to the logo of the M with a dot) are usually called something other than “Ironman”.  However, in addition to the main event of an iron distance race, this one also had a number of other categories: Swim only, Swim + Bike, and relay.  I signed up for the Aqua-Velo race (Swim+Bike) a few days after Ironman Canada, as a good way to judge how I might perform on a flatter course than the rather mountainous Ironman Canada course.  However, I didn’t have any taper for this race, in fact – looking over the last 7 days, I had the ultimate non-taper:

Saturday: 120 mile ride + 4 mile run
Sunday: 4200y swim with 1,000 yard TT sets
Monday: 20 mile run
Tuesday: 1Hour+ trainer ride, 3300y swim
Wednesday: High intensity trainer ride and 10K tempo run as part of brick
Thursday: 3,400y swim and then bricked rather painful trainer ride
Friday: Work, drive multiple hours
Saturday: Race Day.

So, with that background…let’s get onto the race.

(Yes, funny I know, with all the GPS’s I have for sports, I use a simple AAA map for driving)

I drove out Friday evening to the race site, which is way out in the middle of nowhere – about 2 hours from DC.  Here’s nowhere:

I was able to quickly and efficiently swing through packet pickup – took only a minute or two, and I even got two shirts – a long sleeve and a t-shirt.  Plus a nice swim bag.  And socks.  And a water bottle.  Not too bad at all!

From there I added the bag to my pile of existing bags and then headed across town to rack my bike (had to be done the night before):

So with that, I was off to a friends house for the evening, but I’d soon be back at the race site, as the gun was scheduled to go off at 7AM on Saturday morning.  I put a plastic bag over my power meter just to protect it a bit from rusting if it rained overnight.

4:32AM:

It’s way too early in the morning, but I’m headed towards the race site, and oddly enough listening to the Chicken Dance song from Steve’s mix.  Strange.

I arrive first at the high school, which is where T2 is, and where the bike and run courses end and loop through.  Now, I was a bit casual about this race, as normally I would have laid everything out the night before and got it all labeled.  This race…I did it in my car in the parking lot at 5:30AM.  Stuff strewn about everywhere.

Then I headed out with a slew of bags in tow, to board the little trolley bus over to the start.

Once I arrived at the race start I set about trying to figure out where on earth I was going to put all my nutrition.  This would also fall in the category of ‘hmm, perhaps a bit too lax’.  See, for this weekend Coach Alan and I decided to switch things up a bit and go with EFS gel (instead of Infinit I’ve been using).  The only challenge is figuring out where to stick it all.  So…a lot of electrical tape was leveraged.

With that, it was basically time to swim.

The Swim:

Now, because I was there all by my self, I don’t have any pictures before/during or after the swim.  But that’s alright, because there isn’t a lot of good things to talk about in the swim.

They did have a pretty cool helicopter up in the sky at the swim start, though I’m not sure if they’ll publish the pictures. But it was swirling around super-duper-low for a bit.  Just like Ironman race starts.

The nice thing about a smaller field (perhaps a 250-350 or so) compared to a full M-Dot Ironman race is that there aren’t 2,000+ other people trying to swim over you.  So the swim itself was very tame with virtually no contact.  There was one dude somewhere after the second buoy who insisted on physically grabbing (with his hand) and then pulling back my leg so he could try and swim around me.  Not once.  Not twice.  But thrice.  He clearly does not read my blog.  If he had, he would know that I have a very clear policy on such acts.  This policy (documented in my 2008 Ironman Canada race report) states that on the third attempt to grab my leg and pull me back, you will find the full force of my leg in whatever part of your body is closest to my foot…generally in your face.  Like IMC 2008, my policy went into effect on the third pull, and like IMC, further violations on the offenders part immediately ceased.

Anyway, I made so-so time on the first lap, and hit the turnaround in about 32 minutes.  Not great, but not horrible.

There was a bit of moderate chop in the water, which combined with general waves and the sun made it a bit difficult at times to see the buoys…given how few of them there were.  I always find it funny that from a distance to buoy standpoint sprint races tend to have the most buoys, whereas the longer the race, the cheaper on buoys they become.  It’s not as big of a deal in lakes, but in oceans, it’s much harder to see long distances.

At any rate, I kept on chugging my way around the course.  I made pretty good time back down to the 2nd buoy again, but at that point it felt like I hit a wall.  A very slow moving wall.  We shall call that wall ‘current’…or ‘tide’.  Or something. Either way, my pace dropped like a rock.  How slow?  Umm, slowest swim ever slow.

But, I don’t feel too bad, all the race leaders had dismally slow times – even the Swimfest folks (swim only) had rather slow times compared to where they should have been.  And there only job was to swim!

So with that, I wandered out of the water in (cough)…1:11.  A cool 9 minutes slower than my Ironman Canada split.  Woot!

T1: Given the nice small transition area, I quickly knocked out T1 in 2:18.  Which was the 3rd fastest T1 of the day in my race, or 5th fastest overall (out of about 300ish finisher peeps).  Nice!

Swim: 1:11
T1: 2:19

The bike:

So…I ran out of transition, went a few feet forward to the mount line, mounted my bike and then started cruising.  Though, my cruising only lasted about 1 foot.  Maybe a touch less.  It’s a bit unclear.  What is clear is that approximately 1 foot later I went ass over teakettle and made friends with the pavement.  What’s unclear is exactly how that occurred.

Remember how the other day I commented that it would be great to do a transition-only triathlon and that I would “go to the mount line, mount my bike, and then dismount”…well, this isn’t how I envisioned it going down.  Either way, I accomplished exactly that – I mounted…and then dismounted.

After validating that everything was still in one piece (on my bike) and that everything that required spinning movement was still able to spin…off I went.  This time for good.

But that immediately surfaced one little challenge.  My bento box (holding 2 out of 5 gel bottles) had snapped in the whole bike dismount commotion, and my little stack of gel bottles was also flapping around now too.  Which meant it was now swaying in the wind whacking my knees.  Well, to shorten many miles of toying, I eventually ended up rubber-banding two gels to the aero-bottle, put one in the box and then re-taped the other two back to the top tube.

With all that out of the way, it was time to get down to business.

And for the first two hours, I did just that.  Averaged 22.1MPH, pretty solid.  Around then I made it out into the Blackwater National Refuge.  Which is essentially a massive…swamp.  With wind.  Lots of wind.

Now, the thing to keep in mind about a smaller iron-distance race is that you’ll see less people.  There were many cases where I simply couldn’t see anyone in front of or behind me…and I could see a long long way.

It was about this same time that I realized I really had to go.  Given I could see no humans, and this was a training race, it seemed like an ideal time to practice hydration offload scenarios.  Which, I’m happy to say I executed perfectly – and without any undesirable liquid ending up anywhere but the road.  Woot!

During all this flying across the marshlands I did take a quick second to take a self-portrait.  Here ya go:Around this point (Miles say…40-80) I was clearly reminded as why at times I dislike the Ironman distance. Umm..it hurts.  Mentally I think it hurts more than anything.  You realize that you’ve been out there a few hours, and you still have a few more hours on the bike to go.  You’re not quite over the hump yet.  I find the hump in that 80 mile marker range. 

The fact that the wind was driving dead on didn’t help matters.  There were times I’d look down, and I’d be pushing 250w+ and only going 15MPH.  Seriously..wtf.  Those are the times that you get fairly demotivated.  Though, in some ways having a power meter helps there, as you can mentally say “I’m still putting out a constant effort, I haven’t changed, conditions have”.  Though, if you look at my overall ride, you can pretty clearly see where I was getting a bit tired of this whole bike riding thing (miles 50-80).  Note the pink – which is cadence. Given there were no hills (and thus no coasting), there was no reason for me to stop pedaling…ever..for 5 hours.  Obviously the lack of pedaling indicates me getting sick of pedaling.

But I soon found the high school, which was good.  Mostly, cause I didn’t realize I was going to swing through the high school.  I had a different mental picture of the course in my head, which didn’t involve looping back through the school.  So seeing all the spectators there was pretty cool.  I think this was little differentiator from Ironman Canada.  At IMC it was one massive loop, and though the crowds at other portions of the course (middle of nowhere in Canada) certainly outnumbered even the biggest crowd at this race, when I looped through the HS – people were cheering for ME – not just another athlete passing by.  Just me.  That’s cause I was the only one swinging through at that time.  Little difference, but it picked me up some.

From there things got a fair bit better.  Around mile 80 I had the ‘green light’ per my race plan to kick it up a notch HR-wise.  Though, I didn’t quite feel like it yet.  I pushed a bit, but just didn’t have it in me to go to the next HR zone.

(Someone I was catching up to and lapping)

Around mile 90 though I found it and starting having a bit more fun.  Some of this was probably because I was finally seeing people again.  Though, these were people I was lapping (thus 48+ miles ahead of).  But, mentally I could make little games of it and ‘track down’ people I could see off in the distance.  I did slow down, glide, and say hi to each person though.  They needed the encouragement.

Soon I found myself back out in the home stretch, where I also found some newly arrived tidal water:

Above you can see the water off my front wheel.  A few inches deep in most cases.  Not as bad as last year apparently, where it was covering the pedal at the bottom of the stroke.

Here’s a picture of a person I was catching up to, going through a patch of water.

And from there on, it was cruising time.  I simply hunkered down, battened the hatches and pushed through, and knocked out some fairly solid numbers:

Time	Avg HR	Avg Watts
1st  hour	142	236
2nd hour	148	232
3rd   hour	147	222
4th   hour	146	216
5th   hour	151	235
Last :14	156	251

So with that, I cruised through the finish line at the high school.

Bike split: 5:14, avg of 21.4 MPH

Total time on bike wasn’t too bad, about a 15 minute PR over Ironman Canada.  Still a bit slower than I wanted by about 15-20 minutes.  But given the very heavy training week, this wasn’t bad at all.

So I was handed my medal and then was led to the bike racks (photo by me, not of me):

The good news was then when I got there, there wasn’t many peeps there yet:

Hmmm…what does that mean?

Well, it means I get my ass out there and go for a run. :-/

So, off I went, for a nice little run.  Four miles in total.  But again like last week – set on pace – not HR’s.  A pace of 7:40/mile, nice and easy.  Very low Z2 heart rate, perfect for running a long ways post-long-bike.  Out of the whole day, I was actually happiest with the run.  It felt super-easy and very comfortable.  At that point at IMC I was already unhappy panda, this time I felt great.

And then…well, then I was done.

From there I wandered into the gym and picked up my bags and even got a shower.  They had showers for the folks to use!  Awesome.

And finally, about those results:

Woot!  Now..there may have only been a smaller number of people in my age group (though enough to fill out 5-person podium), but I’ll take what I can get.  And I was 9th overall out of a hundred aqua-velo I think, so again, not too bad.

So all in all – a good training day.  And the race was well run too.  There’s some interesting differences between a non-M-Dot race, and an M-Dot race, which I’ll have to compare and contrast some day.  Given I actually ran out on the run course, I got to experience two of the aid stations (they rocked!)…so I think I can give a fairly good comparison…some day.

In the mean time…have a good week!

Friday tidbits

Let’s see, what’s been going on in the Rainmaker world…

Well, first, I fixed my RSS feed.  There was an ‘issue’, resulting from the otherwise massive size of the 310XT review post (68 pages in Word, in case you’re wondering), which caused Feedburner, and in turn Google Reader to go broke.  Doh.  But now all is well, and everything is back to normal. :)

This week has been rather heavy from a training perspective.  Lots and lots of time with my ass planted to my bike seat.  I think I’ve been on the trainer the last three days now, which was after getting back into the swing of 20 mile runs on Mondays.

The run went fairly well, especially given I think it’s the longest I have run since IMC (three weeks prior) was 6.2 miles.  Usually the next day I have no soreness, but this time there was a bit of soreness – but I suppose that’s to be expected given the distance jump.  I was thinking how it’s completely whacky that my run base is high enough currently that I can get away with that.

This upcoming Monday, the run gets a kick in the ass (or a kick in the something else…) when instead of just being a standalone run of 20 miles, it’s got about 1hr 45m on the trainer first..then I get to run.  You know, just to make it a nice solid 4+ hour Monday evening training-fest.  Time to pull Mr. Run Blinky thing out of the closet again for night-time running.

But before we get to that bit of joyfulness…I’ve gotta get through Saturday.

See, I signed up for the Aqua-velo race as part of the Chesapeake Man triathlon (as a side note, do NOT put a .com instead of a .org after that address…just found that out) as a bit of a test run for doing flatter courses.  Anyway…it’s a non-MDot Ironman race.  Except, I don’t have to run.  Well, run far anyway.  I still have to run about 4 miles off the Bike as part of training, but then I get to sit back and laugh at watch everyone else still running. :)

It was funny, this race has a whole slew of categories:

1) Swimfest – just swim 2.4 miles
2) Aquavelo – Swim 2.4 miles, then Bike 112 (what I’m doing)
3) Ironman – The full dance – Swim 2.4, Bike 112, Run 26.2 miles
4) Relay – You get to find some other sucker to do the event(s) you don’t like

Now, I was personally looking for the fifth option

5) Transition Fest – The horn goes off and you run away from the pack/water to/through transition, go to the mount line, mount your bike, turn around, dismount your bike, and run back into transition.  Call it a day.

Regrettably, this option wasn’t offered.  Shame.

So anyway, I’ll be out there Saturday for that action, so if you see me, say Hi!  I’m just training straight through the race, so it’s just a training day for me and not a race.  No taper, no nuttin.  Just a typical Saturday long bike with some water action in the beginning.

I’ve got all sorts of interesting posts lined up for the next few weeks.  With all the new consumer products coming out for the holiday season I’ve got a slew of fun reviews coming up.  Some cool gadgets and gizmos.  And juice.  Yup – Pom sent me some juice, and I’ve been having lots of fun cooking up recipes and smoothies.  Glorious food pictures to follow soon!

Finally, as an aside, I just figured out how to make Blizzards (the ice cream creation at Dairy Queen) using my blender.  This has been a significant achievement in my life.  Likely not ideal for training, but pure brilliance otherwise.  Just sayin’… 

Have a good weekend all!

Swimming the line

Last week following the Nation’s Triathlon, I stumbled on some pictures on Flickr from the event.  There was a huge assortment of pics taken on that day – ones of athletes during each of the sports, a few artistic ones, some general group shots and then a few of the river.  It was one river shot in particular that caught my attention.  This shot (below) clearly showed the massive differences in lines that people took as part of the course.

So I contacted the photographer (Jim Tavenner) and asked if I could use it as the center of a post.  He graciously said no problemo (go check out the rest of his photos from that day!) 

See, the photo is interesting for a number of reasons.  First, it shows the huge differences between the lines people took.  Second, it was taken from an elevated position (the bridge), which makes it really easy to see the whole section of the course.  Third, you can clearly see the number of folks who are struggling a bit (looking at their stroke/position/treading water).  Finally, it was taken later in the the swim (8:22AM), which means that the majority of folks pictured here are likely from earlier waves and are swimming a bit longer than faster swimmers.

That said – let’s start with the official course map as a reference point:

Remember how I wore a Garmin 310XT in the swim?  Well, it recorded a pretty darn clean track – see below.  As you can see the exact real course was a bit different than the above (in both placement and quantity of buoys).  For example, I’m relatively certain there were only two total buoys north of the bridge.

So I started thinking – what if I combined the earlier photo – with a known track used on race day?  Well, first, let’s start with something easier – let’s take my Garmin track, and run it through Google Earth, and then change the point of view to match the photo. 

This below is looking downriver, including the bridge. As you can see, the GPS signal drops out when I go below the bridge, which is fine.  But what I want you to notice of, is the pillars – as that starts to dictate some of the course line that folks will take.  In particular, the right pillar (which is when we start heading downstream).

Now, let’s zoom in a bit, to mimic the photo.  I kept the land portions in-frame so things are a bit easier to understand.

Now after a lot of aligning, re-aligning, more aligning, and a crapton more aligning, here’s the two images merged together.  My photo-shop skillz are limited, so the line is a bit faded, but still very visible:

While it’s not ‘perfect’, it’s about as close as I can get after an hour of toying with it.  So, what does this show us…aside from my line?  Well, for that we need to bring a really big tape measure into play here to understand some distances.  The cool thing about Google Earth is it includes a ruler to be able to determine how long something is by simply dragging.

I took the ruler and then spread it across the width of the ‘screen’ – or essentially the photo (yellow line).  56 yards, roughly.  I say roughly because I don’t have the precise elevation/lat/long to be able to exactly align the photos.  But to me, 50 yards passes the reasonable test looking at the people in the river.  Probably a bit more than that – but we’ll use that as a ‘minimum’.

So…let’s talk about what that means.  See the folks to the right of the yellow line?

They likely all swam about an extra 50 yards round trip. And the folks to the right of the red line?  About an extra 100 yards roundtrip.  And that’s just on the downriver leg – without taking into account the other 2/3rds of the course.  Now, they do save a bit of distance as long as they swim a triangle pattern (remember A^2 + B^2 = C^2?). 

So how much extra time does that equal? I’d guess at least a few minutes for most folks, not including time spent swimming over/under others (as you can see – plenty of others), and then sighting, etc..  You can see a number of the folks off to the right treading water or looking around trying to figure out where to go next.

Now, that’s not to say my line was perfect – in fact far from it.  You can clearly see where I did a wee bit of wandering – especially if you notice my lack of ideal line on the upriver leg earlier on in the satellite photos.  But one thing you’ll notice is that I don’t actually hit up those first two buoys in the above photo – this is because from a line perspective, it just wasn’t the most efficient line.  This is primarily because of the support columns for the bridge, and simply the placement of the turn buoys upstream.

Anyway, when I saw the photo I figured I’d be a perfect opportunity to dive into how much time can be saved simply by swimming the most efficient line.  Which…reminds me – the same concept applies to running – where I did a similar breakdown of how running courses are measured.  Lastly, thanks again to Jim Tavenner for allowing me to use his photo.  Have a good one everyone!