Originally Posted by noglider
Thanks for your response. If you're racing at any level, a power makes at least a little sense, possibly more. It would be fun for me but it would also a lot of complication of setup and maintenance that I'm not up for, not to mention expense. I have an apple watch which measures heart rate unreliably on the bike but oh well. I'm not putting more money or work into it.
If you want to poke around on the cheap, chest HRM’s aren’t terribly expensive. Even better secondhand. I started with a $25 Garmin HRM that works fine. There’s also an app called Cyclemeter that’s essentially a bike computer on your phone. Older Magene speed/cadence meters are a cheap way to feed that app additional data. I used this cheapo combo for a year or so before delving deeper into the data and into my pocketbook. Haha.