Hello dear friends. It’s time for my annual post! Haha. I bought a bike last week and immediately was faced with a conundrum – should I get a bike computer?

I was thinking about my Samsung Epic 4g and figured there surely had to be an app out there that would serve the same function as a bike computer, and would have the added benefit of GPS and route tracking. Well, there is. There are actually several apps, but the one I went with is Google’s My Tracks. It’s free, and it gives you some great info.

There are three screens – the first looks like a fairly normal bike computer giving you speed, average speed, average moving speed, altitude (plus gain, min and max), time, moving time, etc etc etc. The second shows you a graph of your speed over distance and your elevation over distance. The third is the map – which shows you a highlight of your elapsed route. When you’re done with your ride, hit the stop button and you can send the ride to your Google Docs and Google Maps. Pretty nifty.

So, the obvious question was, how I I mount my phone on my bike? I found a few mounts online, but they all looked like those dopey car mounts that grip your phone around the sides with little plastic/foam arms. Not exactly what I would consider the safest option (though correct me if I am wrong if you’ve used one). So, instead, I bought a hard shell case for the phone and took a handlebar mount for a headlamp and super glued the two together.

And presto. A bike computer that cost pretty much nothing – assuming you’ve got the phone already.

As for the bike? Well, Julie thought we should finally just go out and buy some bikes, and we found this thing last Saturday. It’s a 1983 Fuji Supreme that is, apparently, in pretty mint condition. Turns out I got a bit of a good deal on this thing. So, I’m excited to have a good road bike again and am looking forward to a good summer of rides.