Control Geek

As you can tell if you're reading this, I'm a bit of a data and documentation geek. I'm that way partly because my memory for some kinds of information is terrible, and also because I've always been fascinated by measurements and especially map information. And so, when I went skiing yesterday, I wore my wrist-mounted Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS.  I hardly looked at it while on the slopes, but I just got the data downloaded and it's fascinating (to me, at least!).

Here's the track of where we went on the mountain yesterday (my friend and I are solid "Blue" skiiers, so we skipped the terrain parks and black diamond stretches). Click for a larger image:

The straight lines are the lifts...

And here's a plot of my speed vs. elevation:

Evidently, the lifts move at either 5 or 10 mph (the flat blue plateaus lined up with smoothly increasing green elevation lines).  If you look carefully around 4:15 in, you can see where I bit it in the mogul field (no elevation change 1/2 way down the mountain, and zero speed). And, my performance definitely declined as the day went on--it's easy to get tired when you ski twice a  year!  Oh, and around 3:00 we had lunch.

If you have Google Earth and want to fool around with the data, the kmz file is here.