Getting the most out of a GPS

Lyaiera

I bought an Edge 500 last week. I could probably have gotten what I needed with the Edge 200: speed, distance and my route but there's a chance this could save me money in the long run.

I've uploaded a couple of my cycles up to Garmin Connect and Strava and I'm now wondering what to do with the data that's there. I don't have a HRM or cadence sensor. At the moment I'm just looking at things like average speed, distance travelled, looking at any particularly long flat runs and seeing what my speed is there and also looking at any particularly bad hills I encountered and trying to see how bad they are and how I handled them. I'm basing all of this off of speed, so I'm wondering about the other bits. Really I'm trying to figure out how to make the data useful. Not because I need to with the level of cycling I'm at, just because I'm interested in this stuff.

The big thing I'm wondering about is Watts. I've looked at the wiki page, and I see the theory behind it. How do you convert that to usefulness. First off, without a cadence sensor is the wattage given any way accurate? I'm guessing you should be aiming for an even reading throughout the ride but my graph is more like a heartbeat with the ups and downs than anything stable.

Should I be using more than Strava and Garmin Connect? How should the speed graph look in comparison to the elevation graph? In an ideal world I'd translate the info to more efficient cycling. Really I just want to know what the whole deal is about.

Cookie_Monster

veloviewer.com links to strava and can provide some more info in better formats and graphs