After hesitating for a while, I got myself a Garmin ForeRunner 610 in December. This watch was one of the best sports equipment investments I've done so far. It's GPS tracking is accurate and fast, perfect for my running and biking exercises. The most brilliant feature is it's vibration alarm, every kilometer it vibrates and I get an update on my pace, sounds simple but it's ultra-handy. And finally, its a relief not having the iPhone attached to my biceps anymore. Everything was fine, until last week - those who follow me on RunKeeper may have noticed my rants about wrong heart rates. I got 230 beats per minute while standing and waiting for GPS reception (^^). My first guess -> bad HR-strap fitting or dry connectors. After the next run I thought it may be the battery, so I changed it and the problem still persisted. I also tried a clue on how to reset the HR transmitter in order to get it working again, no effect. Finally my patience found an end and Garmin support should take care of...
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We went out for a walk on the first day of 2012 and took our cams with us (finally). Unfortunately it was cloudy and light has not been perfect for this photowalk. Nevertheless, we had a good time walking around the beautiful Wörthersee in the afternoon and I tried to catch the cold winter atmosphere. I somehow luckily cough the lady in the fur coat doing some photos of the silent lake herself. It was clear the moment I took the picture, it will get one of my all time favorites.
In my recent post about online Sports Tracking I promised to wrap a web application around the converter for Polar Personal Trainer XML files. Well, it's done, I spent some time today and created a very small and basic rails web application to ease the job of converting these XML files to HRM files. Now you can easily upload your exercise file from Polar and get a nicely formatted HRM file without having a ruby environment on your computer. You can find the converter on this page or use it below. Please be aware that the script only handles files containing a single activity. I would also like to grab the chance for giving two additional updates on my sports tracking post. First of all, my iPhone apps update showed version 2.5 for RunKeeper today and they finally added auto pause. This could ease my described workflow dramatically! I will do some testing on my bike and let you know how it works soon. The second update regards the Polar RS300x. I mentioned it is capable of getting synced with Polar Personal...
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A friends band, Zen Rodeo, was playing in Klagenfurt this weekend and I offered to create some pictures for them on stage. The light was bad but high ISO and wide open aperture did their work. Enjoy these selected shoots and find some more on Flickr.
Summer time is outdoor time. In terms of outdoor activities I rediscovered running and mountain biking again this year. I didn't like to run in in the past, collected my first experience around 2008 to lose some weight and did my first competition in 2009 at a local half marathon. After this race I stopped training and came back to regular running this year. 2011 provided new opportunities for sports enthusiasts like me, the invention of web based, social media enabled and mobile device supported sports / heath tracking. I've tried a lot of these services and finally arrived at a mix of three tools for tracking and analyzing my endurance training. With this post I'd like to give an insight into my workflow and reasons for my choices. You can find many sports tracking apps and services with a different feature set. Most known are RunKeeper, Polar Personal Trainer, Sports Tracker, RunTastic, Endomondo and Garmin Connect. This list is not complete, there are many more services of this kind out there in the world wild web, but these are the...
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Climbing, mountain biking and relaxing have been the tags of our trip to lake Garda in early September. Our friends traveled to Italy with us in order to have some free time away from daily routine. The region around lake Garda in Italy is well known for hundreds of top climbing crags and it is some kind of mecca for mountain bikers. How to navigate on your bike with an iPhone Finding a spot to climb is easy as pie and with the help of 8a.nu you are able to explore well rated routes and crags. One missing part of the perfect vacation puzzle have been mountain bike routes. My plan was to find some routes upfront and get them on my iPhone to utilize modern mobile technology as good as possible. After asking Google for some route informations around lake Garda I stumbled upon the German Mountain Bike magazine and their route suggestions. They do not only provide descriptions, further more they added downloadable GPX formatted files for each route. Armed with detailed route information and track data the solution would...
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It's a good day, my hardest climbing project has fallen today. After two month of work and many tries falling at the very top I managed to send the route Präsbeton in Göltschach. I'm writing this post because we did a photo and video session in exactly this route a while ago. I "saved" up the blog publication of these media files until the project has fallen. In the beginning the route was planned as a "long time" project for 2011 because I didn't feel ready for this grade. But with the help of Julian, my full time climbing buddy, I was able to figure out all the moves quite fast and of a sudden endurance was the missing part to send it in. Finally it took me between 20 and 30 tries to red point Präsbeton and I kept falling at the last bolt the last two weeks (again, and again). Now I'm very happy for having it on my tick list and being able to move on to the next project. There are plenty of other routes waiting...
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You might have seen my post on how I decided on my new mountain bike using my social networks. After having my new bike for more than one month, I thought its time to tell you how I feel about the decision. Until today I rode 500 km with 12.730 meters elevation on the Canyon Nerve XC 8.0 (check out my RunKeeper profile for details) and I'm finally loving it even more than I thought I would. At first I was a bit disappointed on spotting a little scratch in the frame during unboxing. After contacting the support, waiting for two days and an escalation via the Canyon FaceBook page I got € 80,- for the defect. First I felt like sending the bike back but the scratch is very small, not influencing the frames statics and finally I'll get scratches like these on my first trail too. So I'm fine with the discount. Finding an ideal setting for my fork and rear shock took a while but now it's performing very well on trails, small drops and driving down hill. We...
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I dug out some of my pictures from the past. First of all black and white shots taken at Iron Man events in Klagenfurt (2007, 2008, 2009). In fact, I was looking at my archives for a reason. Lately I wished to do more photography again and therefore looked at my old work to get some new inspiration.
You might have noticed that my page was offline for a while. The reason for this was my host servcity.de. They had some issues and needed to upgrade their server infrastructure. After informing me about the necessary upgrades and my server being down during the upgrade I didn't expect an outage for over a month. After two weeks I dared to ask the support why they don't bring my server up again. They just answered very shortly and harsh (because of many complaining customers I assume). The first thing I did after getting my site back was singing up for a new server at Hetzner. They are more expensive but I expect less problems due to very satisfied customers I know in my circle of acquaintances. The site is up and running again and I expect Hetzner to be more reliable.
Hi, I'm Martin Gratzer. Freelance iOS developer who loves the web. These three tags describe me best and therefore the content of my blog. 
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