We’re trying to organize an indoor triathlon for later this spring to benefit the local YMCA. In order to make the race work logistically, we’re going to organize it by time, not by distance: 10 minutes in the pool, 30 minutes on the bike, 20 minutes on the treadmill. In order to fit in with the Y’s health and wellness programs, we want to score the race by how many calories you burn in all three events. If you want to run the treadmill at a 5% incline, you’ll burn more calories than the guy next to you going the same speed. We can calculate calories burned in the pool using the number of laps and the person’s weight – it won’t be 100% accurate, but it’ll be consistent between participants. The treadmills can measure calories burned per session, so that’s easy.
Here’s the problem: we don’t have enough exercise bikes, so we have to use spin bikes. The bikes don’t have any kind of readouts at all. We think we can find a way to set the resistance level to be the same on all the spin bikes, so we can make sure each person is doing the same work per stroke. The problem we’re having is counting the number of calories burned, or even measuring the distance pedalled in 30 minutes or the total number of strokes.
Any suggestions?
Lee Silverman
JackRabbit Sports
Park Slope Brooklyn
are you trying to favor clydesdales?
I was wondering the same thing.
My local ‘Y’ is in the midst of what they dubbed “The Lazyman” triathlon - one month to do either “Olympic distance” or “Ironman distance”. Of course, they totally screwed those names/distances up, and the “Olympic” is more like Half IM, while the “Ironman” is a 6 mile swim, 115 mile bike (okay) and 40 mile run! I mean, I know there are races with these kinds of distances but a 6 mile swim? No problem given a month of course…
There are charts up in the fitness center showing everyone’s progress, which is nice. What’s not nice is that I was sick as a dog for the first two weeks and have a lot of catching up to do!
My tri club organized a couple of indoor tris this winter at local gyms, and we had a similar problem.
We kept it simple. A 15 minute swim, 15 stationary bike ride, and 15 minute treadmill run, or a “long course” race with 20/20/20, and recorded the individual’s total distance covered. The swim was easy - we just counted each participant’s number of completed laps and converted to yards covered. For the run, again, pretty simple. With the setting on “manual”, how far can you run in the alotted time? Problem was with the bike. We used Lifecycles, which had a readouts for time, distance and calories, but could not figure out an objective way to compare one rider’s effort to another. Because, get this, 15 minutes on a lifecycle at a leisurely pace records the same distance and cals as at a hard pace.
In the end, everyone had the exact same bike distance. BUt no one really seemed to mind and no one complained. The bigger factor was that we never tried to pass this off to anyone as a “perfect” system. We pitched it to our club members as a free, “just-for-fun” kind of event that got them out of their regular winter routine.
However, if you happen to figure out a better way to do it, by all means let us know! Just because we don’t mind that our system wasn’t perfect doesn’t mean we don’t want to improve.
This probably isn’t feasible, but maybe you could buy a bunch of cheap bike computers and attach them to the spinning cycles? Maybe leave them there as part of the effort to benefit the YMCA?
Elite Endeavors has been putting on an indoor tri for a number of years. They use the 15" x 3 format. They calculate scores by number of laps swam, distance biked, and number of laps run on the little indoor track. The bike and run are multiplied by a weighting factor to have all 3 come out about equal. I think Jim Donaldson is a rep for Computrainer, so he uses CT’s for the race. It looks like he has 6 lined up for this years race, but he started with just 2. The race runs in waves for most of the day.
Thanks for the suggestions and feedback so far. We certainly don’t think we’re going to have a “perfect” system, but we do want to measure something reasonable for a “race” where the time is fixed and the distances vary.
So far the ideas posted here are the same ideas we’ve come up with. 18 bike computers is a piece of cake. We just need some way to affix them to the spin bikes, which don’t have spokes. I was thinking of epoxying the magnets to the flywheels, but the Y doesn’t want to do anything permanent to the bikes. Someone else came up with the idea of using a cadence magnet on the crankarm and attaching the speed sensor where the cadence sensor usually goes. I think that will work since the spin bike is fixedgear, so one pedal RPM = some fixed number of wheel rotations. We just have to make sure the resistance is set the same on all the bikes.
Someone else asked if we wanted to favor clydesdales, presumably because a 300 pound guy has an easier time burning calories than a fit 150 lb triathlete. (The big guy can walk at 4 mph while the small guy has to run at 8 mph to burn the same calories in the same time.) There’s a small part of me that says “why the hell not?” That’s the part of me that says that the people at the back of the pack struggle a lot more to finish their races than the people at the front of the pack, and it would be nice to offer some way to reward the effort, not the performance. Sadly, I don’t think the majority of athletes would share that view. Since this is a fundraiser I’d like everyone to leave with a good feeling, not the feeling that the race was rigged.
If not calories, then does anyone have any suggestions for what factors we can multiply the swim, bike, and run numbers by to give them close to equal weight?