chasm54

Carbonfibreboy, I understand what you are saying. I tour regularly, sometimes quite heavily loaded. My expedition tourer weighs about 36lbs and on my last long tour I hauled about 50lbs of gear. So I'm very familiar with the difference in feel, and in particular with the difficulty of maintaining momentum on hills when heavily laden. As it happens, at the end of that last tour I chased a couple of roadies into Toronto. They were out training on a Sunday, and were clearly irritated by the old guy with multiple panniers who kept catching them on the flat after they'd dropped him on the (very modest) climbs.LOL

There's no doubt that the workouts on the loaded tourer, and for different reasons on my fixie, are different from those on my road bike. But to be honest I think that most of the difference is simply that I tend to work harder on thoe bikes. On the roadie, even when I am aiming for a strength session, I'll tend to use the gears to moderate the stress in a way that isn't possible with the fixie or when heaving the weight. Were I disciplined enough to put out the same power on the road bike all the time, I'm sure there'd still be a difference in feel, but I'm not convinced there'd be a difference in training benefit.