Here’s a simple trick to use your Garmin to remind you to eat or drink when you’re on a long ride.
It’s all to do with the Activity Timer function.
On a long ride it’s crucial to keep yourself hydrated, but as you’re sweeping across the countryside living “in the moment”, it’s quite easy to forget. All of a sudden you can find yourself very low on energy and experiencing the dreaded “bonk”.
Here’s a very simple solution you can use, which uses time based alerts within your Garmin Edge 800.
From the menu, go to
- Training>Alerts>Time Alert;
- turn Time Alert on
- Input whatever interval you choose (e.g. 20 minutes)
This alert will then occur as long as you are recording an activity, which means as long as you’ve pressed the Start button.
Alternatively, you can set up alerts based on distance.
This could be useful if you hadn’t planned a specific route, but had a goal distance in mind. Say you wanted to ride 30 miles, you could set a distance alert for 15 and turn around when it beeps at you.
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Great helpful site! Regarding loading TCX files to the Edge 800: I am forced to put the TCX files directly on the Garmin’s memory. When I load to the micro SD card (newfiles subdirectory) they never appear in the Courses folder of the Garmin. If I load directly to Newfiles folder on the Garmin, the routes show up in Courses folder right away. any ideas?
Maybe better still set it by calories I find something between 250 and 400 works great, the harder you are riding the more often you will need to eat and drink, so calorific burn is a good measure.
That’s a really good suggestion! Thank you :-)