I love to ride my bicycle (LeMond Maillot Jaune, for the curious). When I was young, it was just about tooling around town. When I got older, it became my main form of fitness. When that happens — when you get beyond the “casual rider” stage of bicycling, into greater distances — it’s time for a computer.

Bike computers measure time, distance, average speed and more. Really sophisticated ones can give you all kinds of data, like cadence and trend information, but those are more for the racing crowd.  A good computer for the recreational rider would be the Sigma Sport BC 1606L.

To start with, the Sigma is wireless. That’s what I look for; wired computers require you to wrap the wire around your front fork and up to the computer. Wireless eliminates that, and looks better on your bike.

This has all the basics like total distance, time, current and average speed, etc. A couple of additional things I really like about this are the backlight, which is great for night riders, and the integrated storage chip. The chip stores settings like total distance and wheelsize (wheelsize is important — without knowing that, the computer won’t be able to measure anything correctly). So when you change the battery, it retains all that information. With my current computer, I have to reset all the data every time I change the battery, which is usually once per year.

The Sigma is also reasonably priced. So get off the Internet, and get on your bike!