No Watts = No Speed or Distance
Indoor Triathlons are very popular here in the frozen north, offering club triathletes the chance to swim bike and run long before its warm enough to be outside.
In the past, the Life Time club where I teach used Spinner NXTs with a Spinning computer for the bike leg. Participants would run up from the pool, jump on a bike and pedal as fast as they can until the reached the prescribed distance. The clever one's figured out that the amount of resistance they used had no effect on how quickly the computer added mileage, so you had a bunch of flailing legs @ 130 RPM with no resistance = not really doing any real work 🙁
But not this year...
With all of our NXTs being replaced with Indoor Cycles with power, the participants in the Indoor Tri actually needed to "TRY" and ended up really working for their mileage this year!
I took this picture while I was riding a FreeMotion S11.0 at 115 RPM, but with no resistance. You can see in the display that even though I was pedaling very fast, I wasn't producing any power because I had zero resistance. No power = no speed and more importantly, no distance is recorded.
I talked with a couple of finishers about their experience, especially what the bike leg was like, compared to last year.
"It was a lot harder."
"More like riding outdoors."
"I completely over did it trying to keep up with the guy next to me. My legs were junk by the time I started the run."
John is a member on the AFS (Association of Fitness Studios) Advisory Council.
Holding certifications from; Schwinn, Heart Zones, Team ICG and Life Time Fitness, John's held regularly scheduled cycling classes between 1998 and 2015 when he moved to Florida.
When the weather permits, you'll find him riding and leading outdoor groups by himself or with his Tandem partner (wife) Amy.
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