The weather was nice yesterday so I reset the wheel size in the CatEye and redid the same there-and-back-again ride as last time. At the halfway/turn-around point I noted that the CatEye was reporting 5.45 miles, so, in theory that would make a round-trip 10.9 miles. That agrees with manually inputting the turns into google maps with the distance measuring tool. However, the Fitbit app says 10.47 whereas Strava says 10.53…
[interjection — the Fitbit is telling me I’ve been sitting for too long. Gonna go for a short walk and stretch my eyes. … And back]
…so roughly 0.4 miles unaccounted for if google maps and the halfway-measurement-from-the-CatEye-times-two are to be believed. ~3.67% distance loss seems too much for GPS errors even accounting for the GPS points cutting corners during turns. GPS track points are gathered at a certain interval and connected algorithmically sometimes resulting in “cutting corners” like this image. According to the .tcx data file the Fitbit appears to poll the GPS on the phone at one trackpoint per second:
<Trackpoint>
<Time>2018-11-20T12:46:35.000-06:00</Time>
<Position>
<LatitudeDegrees>40.743xxxxxx</LatitudeDegrees>
<LongitudeDegrees>-96.670xxxxxx</LongitudeDegrees>
</Position>
<AltitudeMeters>344.5</AltitudeMeters>
<DistanceMeters>11115.37</DistanceMeters>
<HeartRateBpm>
<Value>127</Value>
</HeartRateBpm>
</Trackpoint>
<Trackpoint>
<Time>2018-11-20T12:46:36.000-06:00</Time>
<Position>
<LatitudeDegrees>40.743xxxxxx</LatitudeDegrees>
<LongitudeDegrees>-96.670xxxxxx</LongitudeDegrees>
</Position>
<AltitudeMeters>344.3</AltitudeMeters>
<DistanceMeters>11118.250000000002</DistanceMeters>
<HeartRateBpm>
<Value>127</Value>
</HeartRateBpm>
</Trackpoint>Dadgummit! can’t get the whitespace set right with wordpress, I’ll try to fix it later… EDIT: I guess manually encasing the block with <pre>…</pre> tags does it.
One problem about this whole thing though, the CatEye stopped recording at around 7 miles. Forgot the actual number since I reset the CatEye shortly after. So it seems I’ll have get to do this little experiment again! Maybe next time I’ll see if I can find another one of those graffiti cats.
As for the ride itself, I saw this weird beaver-like creature. It was an unusual possible rodent for this area, it had a body similar to a beaver but a much smaller tail. I thought it was someone’s giant pet rabbit at first but it definitely was not that. Moved rather slowly. It took me a while to get my camera out of my pack and ready to photograph hence the terrible picture. This fella might not have been particularly fast but he was good at concealment in the brush. [EDIT – I think it may have been a groundhog.]
Also saw a daytime fox near this creature. I generally consider it somewhat auspicious to see a fox at all, let alone during the day, let alone in the day in a park where people are milling about.
Also saw this giant great dane standing in someone’s yard. Passed it on the “there” portion of the ride and again on the “back again” portion, standing in the exact same location staring in the exact same direction with the exact same regal pose. I stopped the bike about 100 yards/meters down the path and did a U-turn wondering if it was a live dog or a realistic statue, was gonna take a picture but the dog slowly turned its head and stared me down so I was like “Ok buddy, you’re real then.” Turned around and proceeded forthwith.
Finally, saw a dog that looked like a lion being walked by a lady who also looked like a lion.
When I got home I remembered to reset the Mity8 overall odometer to account for the wheel-size adjustment discrepancy. The original discrepancy was 38.25 miles but I adjusted for the ~3.87 that was missing from this ride for a total of a ~34.4 mile rollback, as indicated by this image.
*I suppose now would be a good time to mention that the red thing in the mspaint image is supposed to be a fire hydrant.