ridewithgps.com (Score 1)

I personally monitor my bike rides using a Garmin 305. It tracks my location via GPS, my altitude by a barometric altimeter and my heart rate and pedal speed (cadence) wirelessly. I pull the logfiles off the Garmin unit using a cool open source program called gpsbabel, which interfaces with many devices and can translate to pretty much any known log format for GPS logs. What you do with the data from here is a little overwhelming, as there are several desktop applications as well as online applications. I personally save all my logfiles in a backed up directory, then upload them to a website I am working on. The site, http://ridewithgps.com/ allows me to track all my activities on maps with interactive graphs. I have a yearly/monthly/weekly view of my activities, with accumulated miles/elevation climbed/calories burned etc. We calculate average watts expended during some exercise, which is how we calculate calories total. It is really cool being able to watch my athletic abilities improve over time, which is one of the motivating factors for using this setup. It is much more interesting to ride my bike 100 miles a week when I can see everything it is doing for me in one spot. Additionally, the reverse can be done with this website: I can map out a ride on a google map, then send it to my Garmin 305. This allows me to get turn-by-turn directions as well as a map to follow on my ride, which is very helpful for riding a new route! Finally, all the data on your profile is easily exportable and transferable. If you find a new service that serves you better, you are not locked in. This is critical to my sense of security when using any program, so I wanted to make sure no one else felt frustrated if they wanted to move to something else.