In a world where everything is content, it can be hard to separate the monumental from the minutiae. Creating and coordinating content is a large part of my role with REVER and it's fifty percent of my title. While I don’t consider myself a great storyteller, I understand the mechanics involved. In order to tell a good story, you have to establish the context. Recording your ride, taking photos, and leaving notes can be extremely useful in establishing the context.
You might be wondering what any of this has to do with a motorcycle GPS app. Well, REVER is more than that. It is a platform to plan, discover, navigate, and share content in the form of tracks, routes, photos, and notes. It’s an opportunity to connect with other riders through the story of your ride, or to discover theirs.
If you’re anything like me, you don’t just enjoy riding on two wheels. Connecting with fellow humans through sharing (sometimes oversharing) experiences adds a lot of enjoyment to my interactions. While I find it challenging to illustrate elaborate scenes with my words, I can tell a story with photos, videos and REVER, which can be as much fun as the ride itself.
Sometimes it can be difficult to remember the details that provide context. That’s especially true on a multi-day trip where interesting things happen everyday. Even by the end of each day, the details become fuzzy. Tracked rides in REVER include total and moving time, distance, the time you started, average speed and high speed (unless you hide it), elevation and weather.
Now, there is a balance to documenting a ride while still fully enjoying the moment. Trust me; you have to have good balance to document while riding, figuratively and literally. It’s easy to become so focused on capturing the memories that sometimes you find yourself not living in the moment. It’s a tricky thing to know when to be present and when to capture. While I have a lifetime of anecdotes and tips, the keynote is that the tools which make recording simple are the ones you’ll use the most.
That’s where the simplicity of REVER and my phone are the heroes. On a seven day hut-to-hut mountain bike trip with my co-worker, Paul, and other friends last summer, that is all I had for documentation. While I have a lot of experience with a GoPro, the logistics of charging more than one device and the weight of the extra equipment wasn’t worth the haul on the 215+ mile remote bikepacking trip. Plus, I already have thousands of hours of GoPro footage just sitting in purgatory. I started the ride each day by simply launching the route for navigation. REVER automatically records your ride so I was able to focus on the experience at hand. I took photos of the highlights and then saved the track at the end of each day. Then before I slept each night, I would take some time to journal the day's activities in the description box. My phone was my navigation device, camera, gps tracker, and journal. It worked flawlessly, and only required one small portable battery to recharge all six nights.
After the trip was over, I used the 3D replay to share my trip on social media. While I have not done anything with the tracks, photos or notes since last August, anytime I want to revisit my trip, I have everything I need to recall every single day. What I've found is that you don't have to write everything down, because it only takes a few context clues to pull some pretty interesting details from memory. Another thing I’ve learned is that you never really understand the importance of a moment right after it’s over, but the more time passes, the clearer the picture becomes as long as you can vanquish the scourge of a fading memory. The question is, what will you do with the info after you capture it? Keep it for yourself to reflect, share it with your friends, feature it in your community or blog page, or submit for Discover? Whatever you do REVER is here for it.
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