I did a tri put on by the Ohio State University tri club today. Swim 8 minutes, bike 25 minutes on an exercycle, run 15 minutes on a 200 meter indoor track in the OSU rec center. Your distances are used to calculate your equivalent sprint distance triathlon time.
We rode Life Fitness exercycles that are common in health clubs. We could program the cycle any way we wanted, including the level of effort. After 25 minutes, they recorded the elapsed distance.
Since I very rarely ride exercycles in health clubs, my question is: are the exercycles set up so that you are given more distance per revolution if you program the cycle for at a higher level of effort or is the distance calculated independent of the level of effort?
In other words, will I record more distance over a set period by riding at a higher level of effort at about 90-100 revs per minute or by using a low level of effort and spinning at 130 to 140 revs per minute. I tried the latter option today.
Thanks! The race was a lot of fun although it does heavily favor the cycling leg. Look for it next February.
I did a tri put on by the Ohio State University tri club today. Swim 8 minutes, bike 25 minutes on an exercycle, run 15 minutes on a 200 meter indoor track in the OSU rec center. The competitor with the highest combined total distance wins.
We rode the exercycles that are common in health clubs. Sorry I don’t have the name. We could program the cycle any way we wanted, including the level of effort. After 25 minutes, they recorded the elapsed distance.
Since I very rarely ride exercycles in health clubs, my question is: are the exercycles set up so that you are given more distance per revolution if you program the cycle for at a higher level of effort or is the distance calculated independent of the level of effort?
In other words, will I record more distance over a set period by riding at a higher level of effort at about 90-100 revs per minute or by using a low level of effort and spinning at 130 to 140 revs per minute. I tried the latter option today.
Thanks! The race was a lot of fun although it does heavily favor the cycling leg. Look for it next February.
Most of them simply count revolutions to calculate distance. A low load, high RPM ride would probably maximize your score but you would need to check it out to be sure. I would get on that bike and try a few different scenarios and check it out before next year.
If they did it by total distance, you’re better off mashing a big gear than spinning. I haven’t ridden a bike like that in a few years, but thats how I remember it…when I’d gear down to 50-60 RPM I’d be up near 30mph, but at the same intensity I’d ramp it up to 120-130 RPM and only go 22-23mph.
It was probably a LifeCycle and you get the max distance by mashing a heavy gear. Our club outlawed standing while pedaling because everyone got the same distance over the 25 minutes. The spin fast no resistance gets you almost no distance. Push the highest level of resistance you can for the entire 25 minutes–it’s not that long a time and you can shake out the heavy leg feeling with one lap of the track.
Doing this race again on Sunday. Is the consensus that I should mash the pedals of the Life Fitness exercycle at the highest level of effort to get the most distance? The bike is 20 minutes this year.
That is the opposite of what all the big bike splits were doing at our local indoor tris. They hammer for 20 secs get the RPM up over 200 and let it spin down while the distance just tics away. Once it drops down to 100, they hit it again up to 200 and let it spin down. It hurts like hell, its basically doing 30" / 30" Billat style for 20 mins.
Low resistance and high cadence, the speed isn’t accurate but its gets results. I average around 28mph using this techinque. Might not work if they site the resistance or we’re talking about different bikes, but these were the standard computer display gym bikes.
I don’t know anything about the specific bikes you rode, but your story reminded me of an indoor tri I did a few years ago at a local Y. I checked out the bikes ahead of time to see how they computed distance - turned out that the speed was a function of how much resistance you had on the bikes… My husband and I then proceeded to ride at about 20-30RPM (got a lot of weird looks) during the race - we average about 35mph! Haha. I dpn’t think that anyone else figured this out and no one else even came close to the bike splits we posted. I earned the respect of many people that day (who really had no clue what I had done).