Tag Archives: centennial park

5 Laps around Centennial Park today (3.8×5=19km) plus to and fro (another 5.5km) makes the ride today almost 25km. I’m kinda enjoying it, but my behind is really wearing the brunt of my (current) 96kg. And that is the main reason I decide that whatever particular lap is now the last lap.

I do have two lucky features for the ride around the park: 1) lots of things to look at, and 2) the gradient of the park has me not so buggered when I reach the gate to come home and I often fell “Yeah, I can do one more”… A few hundred metres into it and I’m thinking about turning around. But then it gets easy again… and hard… and easy… LOL

And when I get back to the start… “yeah, one more!” :-)

What a beautiful day it is out there… Maybe I should now go for a walk… Circular Quay anyone?

I bought the bike last week and straight away I got on it and done 30km. That was Saturday. On Monday I went and did a couple of laps around Centennial Park (well, 4 laps to be precise) and then came home. I wanted to do more laps, and felt physically capable, but my bum was so sore from all the riding that I simple had to call it quits. That ride, on the Monday, was pretty much 4 laps around the park, and directly between home, there, and back again (which is the east-west line in the map to the right.

Todays ride I did much the same again except this time, after the third lap, I left the park from the Paddington gate and rode back to the bike shop. The ride down Oxford Street was great, since it was pretty much all downhill. Very enjoyable indeed. The reason I was going back to the bike shop was due to the speedometer I bought (the “Incite 8i”). I was really unhappy with it due to it being wireless and it receiving phantom signals from random sources. Over the last couple of days I have had “MAX” speeds approaching 200kmph! On the two rides I had been on (30km and 22km), the speedo had registered 82km, instead of just 52km. And then on todays ride it added on an extra km (only one). So for a total of 73km that I had ridden, the speedo registered that I had done over 100km. This amount of error was unacceptable. It is (apparently) a problem generally with the new generation wireless speedos. I do hear you can pay extra dollars and get a “digital wireless”, but figured that a wired variety is going to give me less grief. So, I went into the shop (Clarence Street cyclery) really not knowing what to expect, and they were happy to upgrade/downgrade the speedo at no cost. Which is good for me since I didn’t have any of the boxes or manuals for it.

Half hour later, I was back on my bike with the “Incite 9i” and I was happy. The wiring is a little ugly (it definitely looked better without it), but I don’t want extra kms added onto my ride just because of some simple interference.

So my recommendation is to NOT grab yourself any of the TREK brand “Incite” speedos that are unwired/wireless. I strongly recommend getting one of the wired models, or maybe forking out the extra and grabbing a digital wirless model, if you so desire. More generally, however, the Incite 9i is vastly superior to the 8i in other ways IMHO. Such as it has an included temperature guage, the up and down mode buttons work in an up and down fashion (pressing one side sends the mode to the left, the other side goes to the right – where-as the 8i just moved sequentially through the modes), and the mode button is more responsive.