Just a little spin…
We’ve been lucky to have a few nice days in a row here in the Pacific Northwest. Sunday was great, and I took the wife out for 20 miles on the local trails.
Monday was nice as well, but I worked all day like a good boy, and went to spin class that night to listen to loud music and visualize riding on the road.
Tuesday promised 45 to 50 degrees and sunshine, and by 1pm I was twitching to get outside. I finished some stuff up for work (honest, I did), and headed out for 26 miles, moderate to brisk pace. It was wonderful. A guilty pleasure, for sure. I should be writing code or something, instead I’m heading north in the sunshine with a nice little tailwind, cruising from 17 to 19 mph and marvelling at my cycling prowess. I of course got a taste of the headwind on the return portion of the loop, but I still maintained a good pace.
I get off my bike back at the car, and my average speed is 14.7. What the hell happened to my average speed? If you have a cyclocomputer with average speed, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that the *$^#@~! thing will show an average speed way slower that you felt like you went. My left brain tells me that this is because the speed is averaged over distance. My right brain tells me that I was freakin’ flying, what about those stretches I did at 18, 19, and even 20? Don’t they count? I think I may need to invent a cyclocomputer that calculates average speed using a weighted scale (where high mph counts way more than low mph), or a button to cut off the measurement when you are slowing for stoplights or the occasional off-leash rottweiler, or an ego-ometer that counts the speed more if you are feeling like lightning. Yeah, that’s it.
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February 10th, 2006 at 5:49 am
The problem is the cycle computers you and I use are reporting nautical miles per hour, fine if we were biking in the ocean, but approximately 15% slower than our fellow land cyclists.
February 13th, 2006 at 8:27 am
It always seems so unfair.
Let’s say I have a hill I’m climbing for 10 miles at an average of 10 mph. (I did a tour last summer in the Canadian Rockies, so I have experience with this.) When I reach the top, I do the 10 mile descent at 30 mph. It seems like my average speed should be 10mph + 30mph /20 miles = 20 mph. Dang it, it’s not. The way I think of it is then in twenty minute intervals — I did 3 twenty minute intervals at 10 mph and 1 at 30 mph, and so the average is actually 15 mph.
I realize this is obvious to all of you math and engineering majors, but it took a lot of thinking in this liberal arts head to work this out.