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AT Cycling Log - 100,000 miles done! Next stop ???

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Mon 6
Tue 10
Thu 6
Good bye boring elliptical machine (that's closer to the television in the gym.) I should spend less time on weights and more time on the bike now. 🙂

Total 242 miles
 
GoSharks said:
Those speeds seem somewhat high, at least for me.
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They could be. Though looking at Phanuel's http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=33069727&postcount=8 graph, they correspond roughly to an hour at 200W for a tempo ride, pushing it to 250-300W for a really hard ride and dropping down to 120W for a light ride.

They also are roughly the same magnitude as the speeds and power values I see on flattish road rides without stops. Of course, hills, stop streets and traffic lights do pretty bad things to real average speeds.
 
I cannot fathom maintaining well over 400 watts for over an hour. I find 200W to be a comfortable "I can do this as long as I want" ride, but 450 watts? For me, maybe for about 1 minute. Then, I'm gasping for air. But, thanks for that graph, Pahnuel! Nice to see that the bike I'm on is roughly calibrated to the lower line on the graph. I can't wait for the weather to improve enough to actually get outside on a real bike. Haven't biked seriously in over a decade. I feel my conditioning, to this point, is pretty decent - It would thrill me to no end to be able to maintain 20+mph on flat road for 10 miles right off the bat; haven't done that in a long time.
 
Normal humans don't do 400W for long. Top professional road racers in uphill time-trials may approach that. A fit amateur club racer, I'd expect in the vincinity of ~300 watts for 10 minutes, ~200 watts for 1-3 hours, with those depending on their abilities and age of course.

As an example, this ride is estimated at 232 watts for 1hr 46min, 21.5mph average, and that was a very good performance for me (and I was the state Masters C road-race champion the year before that). Notably, that is a solo effort on a standard road bike with fenders and a rear rack (not a time-trial bike); I had no one along to draft behind. Winds were fairly neutral as I recall. The moral of the story is, even a fairly fit amateur won't sustain 300-400 watts on a real bike for hours on end.


Today was a bona fide rest day for me, so I just have 3 miles to report, the short commute.

Total: 245 miles
 
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I rode 9 miles to meet up with guys for a ride, and the ride itself was 30 miles. I took the studded-tire mountain bike, the other four guys were on road-racing bikes and one time-trial bike, so I had to work a bit, but my training base was a big asset and I annihilated them on the main ascent.

Total: 304.5
 
Today I did a nice country loop with some clubmates. It has one noteworthy climb, about 530ft ascent. I took the sport-touring road bike this time, hit the climb hard, dropped my buddies satisfactorily, and managed 2nd place on the leaderboard for the climb:

http://app.strava.com/rides/4800113

Anyway, 51 miles on the ride, plus 9 miles getting to/from the ride, so another 60 miles for AT!

Total: 436.5
 
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Guess I'll contribute my slightly out of shapeness miles from this weekend. My only problem is I look at rides as elevation gain/time, not really focusing on distance. So I'll spend 3 hours doing 40 miles because 2 hours of it was just straight climbing at <10mph.

Saturday, moderate intensity mountain bike hill climb ride: 18 miles
Sunday, light hill climb road ride: 27 miles

Total: 574
 
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edcarman said:
As others have mentioned, I've found the speed and calorie readings on most spin bikes and gym bikes to be pretty far from what I'd normally expect for rides of various intensities.

I suggest we agree on a simple rule of thumb to apply to rides logged on spinning bikes (and to a lesser extent, indoor trainers). Something like 19MPH for a tempo ride, going up to 23MPH for a really hard ride and down to 15MPH for a light ride.
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Or just not post at all since elitists will whine about it not being the same thing as riding a *real* bike, even though miles are miles (circumference * RPM, etc) and OP asked for both real and stationary... oh well, not my loss, I'm down 12 lbs in a month, that's all that matters to me.

Does the runner thread not consider treadmill miles to be "real miles" either?
 
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exdeath said:
Or just not post at all since elitists will whine about it not being the same thing as riding a *real* bike, even though miles are miles (circumference * RPM, etc) and OP asked for both real and stationary... oh well, not my loss, I'm down 12 lbs in a month, that's all that matters to me.

Does the runner thread not consider treadmill miles to be "real miles" either?
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Some basic differences between riding a bike on a trainer vs running on a treadmill.

1. Wind resistance is vastly different between riding a bike and running due to the speeds attained on a bike. So being on a trainer you're excluding a huge part of the resistance you encounter out riding around.

2. Bikes typically have gears and each trainer has a different level of inherent resistance. So saying you can do circumference * RPM when we don't know any of the resistance is not a very useful measurement. Hence, again, why wattage is the preferred measurement on stationary bikes because you remove all of the gearing and various resistances machines may have.

I could put my road bike into 50x11 and do somewhere around 42mph with no resistance with the real wheel just hanging in the air and a speed sensor attached. But that's not really a realistic measurement of anything is it? Rollers, which I'm waaay to uncoordinated to ever ride have different roller diameters which correspond to different wattages needed to attain the same mph on each. Smaller rollers are harder, effectively, to reach the same speed on versus the larger ones. http://www.mountainracingproducts.com/kreitler/kreitlers-guide-to-choosing-rollers-step-2/

When you're running on a treadmill, it goes at a certain speed and you go that speed. You aren't inducing mechanical advantage into the equation with gearing when running.


Sorry to come off as a complete ass like this, but it's disingenuous to say that they're basically the same when they're not at all.
 
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