How fast am I?
 

ok so i've not managed to get out on the bike much recently due to work and weather but been doing a fair bit on the excercise bike machine in the gym (boring I know). having started riding in the summer i managed 3 centuries before wionter set in so now my long riding has become very infrequent.

today I did a 20mile TT on level 6 (medium setting) over a preset hilly course (in the gym).

dist: 20miles
time: 1hour 1min 25sec
avge HR: 156 (82% MHR)
avg spee: 19.5

I reckon i could have averaged over 20 mph as i didn't decide to do a 20miler until after a good 15 mins or so. as i started closing in and realising i could/nearly did it in one hour i thought....

...is this any good? more specifically what kind of time would an average cat pro, 1, 2, 3 & 4 rider expect to post on an average course?

There is no such thing as a mile on a stationary bike. You didn't go anywhere, your speed was 0mph. The numbers they display are meaningless and you can't compare them against real riding. If the machine you were on measures power output, you could at least compare that, assuming it was accurate...

If you can watch Ocean's 11 and Ocean's 12 back to back while staying on a trainer then you have accomplished something.

How about Pirates 1 - 3? Would that be an accomplishment?

why are the 'miles' so meaningless?

i would have thought the guy that designs them would have done a bit of research and created some simple formula involving resistence, power and revoolutions.

i'm no scientist but surely it is simple math to calibrate those inputs and get the machine to display a reasonable accurate reading?

How far ahead were you of the guy on the exercise bike beside you when you finished?

wanders - i smoked him. he was a DNF.

Yes it would. My Cycleops Fluid2 hasn't seen action for two years except for the 30 minutes the day I set it up.

I'm getting ready to get on the computrainer for an hour or so. Should be quite a bit of fun.

Watch out for cars......

It's the signs that are tough, sometimes it has you riding right through them. :rolleyes:

My stationary trainer secret is playing "insert video game here" while pedalling. My best is 2 hours of gameplay/trainer time in one sitting. Granted I can't mix it up too much while doing that, but it gets the job done and get a decent workout. Still playing Tiger Woods 07 at the moment and I added my bro's old aerobars so I can lean forward for the pressure putts.

Don't try this on rollers unless you're special.

I'll agree that trainer and actual miles are two different dogs.

If I told you I did the 20 miles on level 7, in less time, with the same program, would you really trust that we were riding identically calibrated machines?

Fixed.

stationary bikes don't mean squat. sure they give you a workout but,


only a TT outdoors on the road on a bike is a TT.

20 mile TT, (slightly rolling, out and back) if you kick it out in 36-38 minutes you are flying at cat 1 status.
give or take...a lot depends on the exact route, how good you are at turning around, and wind or cow poop on road

also remember that air resistance is a huge factor. I don't know the calculations but every 1/2 mph faster
above 20 mph is about 4 times harder than 1/2 mph above 10mph....or some exponential increase.
if you are not fighting the wind, you ain't doing jack

waterrockets & umd: are you able to explain why the computrainer miles aren't worth their salt?

when marathon training a few years ago i remember reading up on treadmills quite a bit and the general consensus i found was that you need about a 2% incline to get the similar workout to running outdoors. if 'they' can calibrate a treadmill to be fairly accurate, why not a stationary bike?

I didn't hear them say that they weren't worth their salt. I don't think anyone is going to say that training with power isn't beneficial whether it is inside or outside.

If you can watch Oceans 12 PERIOD, you have accomplished something. I could never finish that movie, and I've tried about 6 times!

I got that from a thread about someone that actually did it.

what I love about those machines is if you have a high cadance, the resistance is nothing. I was on one at my local gym, and pedaling away and I realize I had maxed out the "resistane" For some reason, I stopped pedaling for a second, and when I pedaled again, I couldn't go past like 80rpm at that resistance, and had to crank it down alot.

Completely worthless.

the point I think we are trying to argue, is "how fast am I ?" cannot be estimated unless you
get on a bike and go find out how fast you are for real.

trainers do in fact work great, but they will not answer "how fast am I ?"

ok, to sum up, because I'm sick and stuck at home.

Air resistance increases as the square of speed. This means that going twice as fast is going to be pushing wind back at you with 4 times the force.

BUT Energy is force times distance, and power is force times speed.

This means that going twice as fast actually requires 8 times as much power, if your frontal area/aerodynamics situation doesn't change.

Your resistance of "6" doesn't change with speed, so on a stationary bike at the gym, going twice as fast will only require twice as much power. Another way of saying it is that speeding up on a stationary bike will be 4 times easier than a similar speed increase on a real bike.

Not to say that training indoors isn't a good idea, it just can't be compared to actual riding. If you know your personal HR zones, then you can get a comparable workout inside as you would outside, and the best measure is power (I would argue), but I haven't seen a bikes at the gym that measures power. (cheap gym)

Even then, riding indoors presents a different physiological situation than riding outside. For me at least:
I sweat like a b*tch when i'm inside, even with fans on me, and I find it harder to maintain the same HR or power that I would be able to maintain outside. (properly calibrated) I would guess that this is a mixture of warmer temps/higher humidity at the gym (or my garage), and lack of motivation to ride indoors.

Moral of the story, it doesn't matter how fast you are. If you have to ask, nobody cares. The correct answer is always "not fast enough".

I didn't say that they aren't worthwile training, but you can't really think that you can hop on a gym exercise bike and that equals real distance ridden on the road. It is exercise, and it is a workout, so it is not worthless. My main point of contention is your desire to see how your "speed" compares to a real TT, and the issue is that a mile on a trainer loses its context and is therefore impossible to compare to real life. A computrainer is probably better than most but certainly a gym's exercise bike
(which is what you said you were using) is completely bogus. The numbers they put out on those are designed to make the exerciser feel good about what they just did.

Now, the second part of my post was that you should be comparing POWER not SPEED. Assuming that the power reading (watts) is accurate, you should be able to get a good idea of how you stack up against various categories. You can do tests of varying durations to determine your Functional Thresholds, and compare those. I've never done it, but a teammate has been using a PowerTap for a little while now and did tests for his FT and found that he was at the high-to-mid cat 3 level for most durations.

Btw, sorry I didn't reply back to you sooner, I was out riding real miles on a real road.

Edit, oh yeah, my best time for a TT is just over 25 min (23.6mph) for a 10 mile TT. The record on the course is just under 22 minutes, set by a cat 3 (with points to upgrade to a 2) while training specifically for TTs. 329W and 27.23mph for a time of 21:48. Look up pro/1/2 times for 40K TTs (close to 20 miles) and you will find your time doesn't stack up very well even if it were real.

ok so what time would an avge cat 4 rider expect to do an outdoor 20mile TT in over an average course?

True, other than personal bests and achieving goals and maybe discussing these with a close friend it really doesn't matter.