Smokehouse

I have a nice, little "crit"-like neighborhood to ride in. In a single 2.4mi "lap", it is a relatively small amount of elevation change but has 16 hard turns in each lap. I can work on hard corning given how isolated my neighborhood is...there's very little traffic.

For years, I've used my road bike for these sets and utilized it for quick, hard 10-12 miles sets when I'm short on time. It makes for a great little workout.

Late last summer, the city did the dreaded "chip seal" on a few of the roads and now they are near useless for my road bike. A good amount of small, sharp, chip gravel all over the place.

So...this year, I took to the set with my 2012 Specialized Crossroads bike I use for family riding. It's funny, I can get a good workout but the difference in bike weight and riding position was instantly noticeable when I looked at the data (my other bike is a '12 Tarmac). I guess that ultimately, this really means nothing but I though I'd compare two similar rides with different equipment (same time of year, almost equal wind speed/direction, temp, etc). The info will be listed as Tarmac/Crossroads:

Distance: 10.6/10.4mi
Duration: 37:48/43:09
Speed (average-max): 16.8-28.9/14.5-22.1
HR (average-max): 156-174/161-186

I can get nearly a +2.5mph average and almost +7mph top speed on the Tarmac...but, as you can tell by my HR data, I'm working quite a bit harder to get the speed out of the comfort bike. (BTW...I've done these sets on both bikes quite a few times, this data is pretty static across all sessions give or take).

Either way...this is nothing scientific but it was fun to compare sessions and see the differences.