To get to the pool every morning, I put my kid in a seat on the back of my $65 Walmart “mountain” bike which must weigh about 40 pounds- without the kid.
It’s 4.5 miles each way and I am *working *the whole time… none of this leisurely-Sunday-evening-on-the-bike-path-with-the-family crap.
A friend of mine who was a well-regarded local cyclist says this doesn’t really count as training, since the positioning is terrible. Is he right?
I realize for general fitness it’s just fine, but will it help or hinder my performance on a road bike setup?
I have a 4 mile commute each way to work. I ride a big tired hybrid with panniers, fenders, a bell, etc. It is great for the purpose of getting to work. It is only 20 min each way, so I obviously don’t get endurance training there. What I do find is that it is a great recovery ride. If I did a hard run or bike club ride the evening before I find it really “clears out” my legs and helps me bounce back. It is also calories burned. If I can manage to go every day, that is over 3 hours in the course of a week, and every little bit helps!
I’d count it as “general endurance training”. Your muscles aren’t working in the same way as they would on a bike in a racing position, so you aren’t necessarily doing a lot for the particular muscles you need to race, so I would be wary about counting it as “cycling-specific training”. For what it’s worth, that’s my take on it.
A friend of mine who was a well-regarded local cyclist says this doesn’t really count as training, since the positioning is terrible. Is he right?
I realize for general fitness it’s just fine, but will it help or hinder my performance on a road bike setup?
Your friend, a well regarded cyclists should know better! It does count!
Its probably more like a session on a leg machine in the weightroom than 9 miles of road bike riding but its a great strength workout. Even a walmart MTB has some adjustibility so get your seat height as close as you can to your road/tri bike position and pedal away.
Once consideration though is that your position on that bike is a drastically different hip angle to what you ride in your races (goes for both road or tri/TT), so due to the principle of specificity it’s not as good as it could be.
Can you adjust the fit on that bike to more closely resemble the hip angle you get on your race bike?
“Can you adjust the fit on that bike to more closely resemble the hip angle you get on your race bike?”
No, I can’t adjust it at all due to the restraint imposed by the child seat’s hardware.
**“**So what does your kid do while you’re swimming?”
I usually give him a sharp knife and a bar of soap and tell him to whittle somethin’ pretty for daddy… but he always winds up playing in the gym’s nursery instead.
All you really need to do is to replicate your hip angle that you have on your race bike. That can likely be accomplished by getting your front end moved (probably lower and more forward).
However, rest assured that either way this is ‘training’, although I’m not sure how it fits in the whole of your training plan. It’s a much better way to get you and your child to swim practice than driving!
This is actually how I got into triathlons. I’ve been riding to and from the pool forever and a girl I worked with finally says “you swim and bike everyday? You should start running too and do a triathlon with me”.
To get to the pool every morning, I put my kid in a seat on the back of my $65 Walmart “mountain” bike which must weigh about 40 pounds- without the kid.
It’s 4.5 miles each way and I am *working *the whole time… none of this leisurely-Sunday-evening-on-the-bike-path-with-the-family crap.
A friend of mine who was a well-regarded local cyclist says this doesn’t really count as training, since the positioning is terrible. Is he right?
I realize for general fitness it’s just fine, but will it help or hinder my performance on a road bike setup?
Count it, but its not quite as good as specific training on your actual tri or road bike. I used to haul my dog around in a Walmart kid carrier when he lost the ability to walk. He weighed about 80lbs and the carrier was a beast. Of course, I had to challenge myself to start trying to make it up certain hills and see how fast we could get from one point to another. Before he passed, we had a great route and workout that left me pretty drained but with a smile on my face and his.
Have fun, your kid is going to always remember the good times in the trailer
My coach actually wants me to do a mountain bike ride every week as it builds skills and strength. So I have no idea why it would not count. It’s still a ride.
oh yes it counts…with a baby on the way I will be working similar training in next year.
as a side note, after 19 years of specific triathlon bike training I have been doing most of my bike training on a mountain bike with a mixture of bike path riding and single track mt bike trail riding the past 4 years…my bike splits at triathlon have been on par with splits when I did all my training on my triathlon bike…and its alot more fun…