The one my wife did last year required a specific resistance. You had 1 or 2 minutes to get to that level so if you could grind out in a harder resistance, you could cover a little extra ground before having to use cadence to be the thing to get you over the line. They had a timer (me) and then a monitor that made sure everyone was at the right resistance as well as completing the distance.

This is going to be a really dumb question...

For mileage on a stationary bike, is it better to do low resistance or higher resistance? I know the difference on an actual bike, but also see people at the gym burning along at like a 5 resistance with no effort. That method will also really save my legs for the run as well.

I've never really used stationary bikes, besides for spin classes that are all about rpm/power, and I don't even look at the distance.

At the Lifetime fitness indoor tri the other month, the bikes had Stages power meters on them, and the power was translated into speed by a head unit. I basically targeted a power level at or a little over my FTP for the 30 minute ride. I think in the end it said I had traveled ~12 miles in 30 min, which is not too far off for what I'd expect to see on a road bike.

In past years the bikes had a different power source, and I recall that there were 1 or 2 that gave really funky results, so take the results with a grain of salt.

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Cheers,
Sam

Similar to biking...higher resistance with the same cadence covers more distance. Low cadence with high resistance would be like hill climbing so I try to target the same 95 cadence I do on a bike.

Agree. I've done an indoor tri the past half dozen or so years at Ohio State University that uses a Lifecycle for the bike. We ride 20 minutes. The field in this tri consists mostly of college tri club team members. The longest distance covered this year was 11.03 miles by the winner. The participants who finished in the middle of the pack rode 7.3 miles.

Have fun!