Rodman, I want to talk to you about a cycling app that I'm using at…
Rodman, I want to talk to you about a cycling app that I'm using at the moment. And I don't like apps, so this is what listening to let's cue that intro. The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness and our longevity? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh and welcome to the Rodman Podcast. Hello you beautiful roadmen, welcome back to another roadman podcast. How is everybody keeping this Tuesday? I spoke yesterday about my love for alliteration and yesterday I teamed up a motivation on Monday. Well I think I'm going to continue that team and I'm going to go for Tech Tuesday. This may or may not be something that continues as the weeks go by but it's just something and that's kinda flocked my boat, articling my fancy, if you will, today. Before I jump into the substantive part of this short-form podcast, I want to remind you all to jump on over to patreon.com forward slash Anthony, underscore Walsh. I'm gonna stick the link in the description down below. Guys, Patreon, I bang on about it every single day, but it's what makes this podcast sustainable. It's, we don't have ad sponsorship at the moment, so if we want this podcast to be around, we want this podcast to endure, it's going to be one of those things that we're going to have to vote with our wallet. I know I support loads of Patreon independent creators. Basically everyone I listen to, the reason is because like Foxx, Goy Sports and Rupert Mordok, you know, paying them money when I'm the small creators out there struggling and I listen to them every single day. So that's why I choose to give through Patreon and that's why I decided to set Patreon up for this. So today's podcast, I want to talk to you about an app I'm using. Now I would be a force person to say I hate the idea of having another app on my phone. Remember when iPhone came out to start for the original iPhone? I was back in law school and they had this advertising slogan, there's an app for that. It was brilliant, but literally now there's 400 apps for that. Every single thing you can think of is about 400 apps. I have a folder on my phone for cycling apps and the last thing I want to do is recommend an app to you. That shit. So this is an app I've been increasingly using lately and it's called Camus KOMOOT. I'll put a link in the description for it. Why I mention it, firstly it's a free download and that's important that I think because unless something is absolutely epic or I'm reluctant to get another subscription for a cycling app, Strava Premium. is planned. There's a bunch of these you know cycling apps that I need and I probably wouldn't have tried it if I'm honest if it hadn't been free but now that I have tried it if it was to go premium at some point I would pay for it. Essentially what it is it's I describe it as TripAdvisor meets Strava and I'll explain to you why I'm describing it like that. So we've a number of different aspects to three main aspects. If you're planning an aspect, if you're during the road and then you upload aspect at the end. So that's basically upload the road and then you've all your social stuff like you know commenting and stuff and uploading photos and all that stuff.
For me that's kind of nonsense I'm not too into either of the I was…
For me that's kind of nonsense I'm not too into either of the I was aspect like record my upload because like I record my road in my wa-hoo anyway and I don't need to record my right twice and I'm not that into the social validation and getting comments and say, way to go, Anthony, what a ride today. Some people are, and that's great if that's you, and that's how you get your motivation. But for me, I guess, are more intrinsically motivated. The motivation comes from inside more, so I don't really like that stuff. And a lot of the time, I actually don't like people know what sort of trying them doing. But one aspect of it that I love is the first aspect I mentioned, the planning aspect. So there's a couple of different features with this. So you can plan your route, and you can download it for offline use. This means if you're going somewhere where you're not going to have signal, where you're not going to have internet, it's brilliant. So that's especially good if you're gravel roiden. That's one nice feature. Second nice feature, you can see other people's roids. So you know if somebody lives in an area or if somebody local has a reputation for finding these amazing roids, you can follow them and you can download their roids and send them as a GPX file to your Wahoo. Now, this integrates beautifully with the Wahoo ROM and that's why I've sort of stumble across it. So say I planned my, you heard me speaking in recent podcasts about my cycle from Dublin to Kinsel. So I planned my Dublin to Kinsel route on it. So I said Dublin, Clontharath as my start point, and I said Kinsel as my finish point. Now as I plot the route, a number of options they are presenting themselves, which I think makes this very unique, because Google Maps can do the other bits that I've talked about so far. So you start in these wee little icons, hoylises icons, and these are basically like reviews that other people have left along the way. So they could be cool shit like a viewing point or a castle that you need to go and see, or it could be a cool coffee stop where, and you can put comments in. So someone might say, you know, here's the, here's the location of the coffee stop, Mary's Coffee, Mary's O's the Best Scones, all of Toreless, and you just need to click on Mary's Coffee Shop and it'll set a deviation to your route to take in Mary's Coffee Shop on the way. This is amazing because when I was over in the States, I literally rode 10k from the Grand Canyon and didn't get to see it because I didn't know it was that close to me and that might sound stupid now in this age of internists and super connectivity but I didn't have cellular data on my phone over there and I had no idea that I was that close to it and this probably happened to me countless other times that I don't know about. So this idea of crowdsource and people leaving reviews and you have to check this out, you have to check that out. So you start off and you plan your Dublin to Cork, and then you end up adding in 10 or 20 of these wee little deviations. Some of them are only a couple of hundred meters. And it really transforms it from being a fairly bland roid to something that's spectacular because you get all the best roads, you get all the best views, all the best coffee shops.
On its own is a winner for me
That on its own is a winner for me. But then I love the feature where you can, as I said, the Dublin to Cork route, can choose if I want road scenic gravel or mountain bike and it'll change the amount of off road. So if I click gravel which is getting hyper trendy at the moment, if I click it'll change the composition of the road. So it'll say 70% is road, 30% is rough terrain. Versus if I change the mountain bike it might say 70% is rough terrain, 30% is road. That's pretty cool. It gives this sort of surface summary at the end of it. So they are the reasons that I don't you strive anyway for navigation I know everyone's going to jump back on and say yeah you can download a GPX file from Strava and you can but you need to be a Strava premium member which I am not. Komoot gives that same functionality for free and it lets you crowdsource your route so it lets you leave reviews along the route and if you want to be a responsible commuter. Komooter is that a thing? It should be. If Komooter is not a thing we need to make Komooter a thing. That's an epic phrase, a pectorn of phrase, that's what you get, that sort of wordology here on the podcast. You need to be a good commuser and leave review it. So if you are doing a local route and you know that the coffee shop in wherever Ballyball is an amazing coffee shop to stop by, do leave a little route, leave the picture in, leave the comment in, tell them what's the best dish to get. And because other people are going to benefit from that and the whole rising toy lifts the whole platform. That's all I wanted to talk about today on Tech Tuesday. See the alliteration it rolls off the tongue. That's why we'll go with it. But we're back tomorrow for our feature lent long-form podcast. As always every Wednesday, this one's a cracker. I have XBMC, nutritionist Barry Morion, Barry Talks, how to optimize your diet for racing, for training, talks about some of the common misconceptions around the amount of carbohydrate we need to to consume the power of trying, it's a cracker. Finally, go check out roadmanresources.com if you haven't already. I'm uploading stuff almost every day into roadman resources. I'll actually stick Camoot in when I get around to it and I link to the Camoot platform. So what I do on roadman resources, it's a brand agnostic. This is not a plug place for sponsors. It's brand agnostic stuff that I'm finding and using, testing and I'm really relying on it. I'm listing it there and yesterday I talked about a cream I've been using and I know a bunch of you guys reached out to me today. It's called Amp Human and it's a boy carb cream that when you rub it onto your legs it helps inhibit lactate acid production. It's really cool. I've linked that up over on roadman resources along with a bunch of other stuff. So I hope you'll enjoy it, share it around, send to your club mates, send to people who are new to getting into training. I thank you for listening to my rambling's once more on this roadman short form podcast. I'm gonna chat to you all tomorrow. Enjoy your day.