Spin Bike

If I am going to make it to my goal of 2000km by bike or foot I need to be able to do some cycling before the snow is gone.  To do that I am going to count kilometres done on the spin bike just as I count the ones done on the treadmill.  I find both the treadmill and the spin bike to be boring, and not nearly as rewarding as being out in the world running or biking, but it is winter in Canada and I rode my bike enough times as a kid in the winter to know that on country roads it is borderline suicidal.

After work yesterday I went to the gym with a few things in mind.  Do my 150 push ups for the day, do the leg day exercises I have skipped in favour of combining arm and leg day the last few times, and ride the bike.  These are all things I accomplished.  But I ran into a bit of a dilemma when it came to the bike.

Riding my mountain bike all last summer here, there and everywhere I would average about 23 km/h (14 mph).  Not too shabby for a mountain bike.  On the spin bike yesterday I rode 8.14 miles in 20:05.  Fantastic! Also totally unreasonable as that is a rate of about 40 km/h! (24 mph).  I don’t think that I doubled my speed in the last couple months.

I understand that I would be able to go faster on a road bike which is more what a spin bike is meant to simulate, I get that I was doing a cadence of about 95-100 the whole time which is much higher than I do in my bike outside.  But for the sake of consistency and my own integrity I have decided that I will count the miles on the spin bike as kilometres.

Yeah it would be a huge boost to my goal to pretend for a few months that I can ride a bike at 40 km/h, but it’s totally not realistic (unless I get a road bike and discover that this is true later in the year) and so I will not convert the miles to kilometres and take the loss in possible distance.