And yeah, about stuff like muni - it's punishing, and your heart rate is
up, but it's not consistent and consistently difficult. You feel
thrashed afterwards, but not because you, say, dumped exactly 250 watts
into the road for the last hour at 100 RPM. So, doing MUni or
ungeared-coker riding on hard terrain, you'll definitely get a level of
fitness others don't have, but it won't necessarily be the ability to
push the pedals hard at a constant RPM and cadence for a long time
without ever taking a break. On pretty much anything less than a geared
coker (except, for some, maybe a geared 29), if you're just pedaling it
on anything but the steepest climbs, you're not really getting training
that will make you powerful (i.e. able to really stomp up hills in high
gear and keep up high cadences in heavy gears for long periods of time).
But don't get me wrong, you'll be REALLY fit, and you'll be able to
punish yourself like that longer and harder than someone who doesn't do
it... maybe even someone who spends all his time on a road bike. I'm a
total roadie, and muni sucks the wind out of me quite reliably: while
some of the people I can usually out-coker on the road are WAY stronger
than me on rocky trails, and can keep trucking along through drop after
drop, rock after rock. But it's rare that those hard spots last longer
than a minute or two before there's 20 or 30 feet of just spinning on
relatively smooth trail; on a road bike, you'll work 80% as hard for
50 times the contiguous time span, and that's where the coolness of the
measurability and gear choice lies.
So I'm not saying Muni's not hard; it's clearly really hard, and though
I'm not really great at it, it ALWAYS can take energy faster than I can
recoup it. It's really hard... but it's not consistently aerobic like
what you can do on a road bike unless you're going up a perfectly smooth
fire road with something like a 10% grade (assuming you're on a 24ish
inch wheel).
--
chuckaeronut
Uni to work to eat to live to uni to work to...!
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