It goes boom diddy boom diddy boom diddy boom diddy boom diddy boom diddy boom boom boom!

My heart is racing, I know this not because I'm struggling to climb yet another uphill stretch of road on my bicycle, but because my fancy new heart rate monitor is telling me so. It also tells me this particular hill is being climbed at a rate of 14 metres per minute and when I get to the top the inbuilt altimeter will tell me how high it is.

What was once a vague science involving judging the feeling in one's legs, measuring the difficulty of a cycle ride has become an exercise in analysing and interpreting the statistics provided by the vast array of data given by the increasingly prevalent heart rate monitors and the now standard presence of bike computers. My country rides used to simply involve looking at the scenery and worrying if I'd locked the front door on my way out.

The ante was upped with the addition of a bike computer and I found myself spending a lot of the ride watching the odometer creep agonisingly slowly upwards whilst simultaneously battling to keep the average speed up. There are even little arrows to tell you if you are above or below your current average, a tiny little icon that makes a big comment on your progress:

Arrow pointing down? You’re below your average speed. The computer is really saying you are slow, lazy and getting even slower and lazier as you go (an opinion recently countered by the heart rate monitor going through the roof as you puff away to drive the pistons).

Arrow pointing up? You’re above the ride’s average speed. You know it's only temporary right? You'll crack soon enough.

Now the latest gizmo to join the arsenal of technological warfare on my handlebars is my Suunto Heart Rate Monitor Watch, incorporating many other useful features like compass, barometer and altimeter amongst others. I can now fight back against my bike computer's measly stats (albeit stats provided by my legs) in a kind of high tech top trumps game.

Average speed of a pathetic10 miles per hour? Maybe so but my average heart rate was an encouraging 150bpm.

Distance covered a measly 20 miles? Yes but during that time I climbed an aggregate of 800m up horrible hills (curiously enough no one mentions the 800m of freewheeling descents that must entail)

So these days after a ride there is so much information judging my efforts that I can pick and choose whichever ones are the most encouraging and reward myself with a large glass of wine however I do. And if all else fails I can fall back on the fact that none of these gadgets take into account the awful state of the bumpy Irish roads that surely suck up so much energy it’s like riding with the anchor thrown out the back.. Plus I'm sure the wind was in my face for the duration of the whole ride anyway. Now where did I put that glass of wine?