I live in a city where we can frequently get some pretty crazy winds coming off of the nearby lake. One of the flat bike paths that I ride on is directly next to the lake and I knew it was extremely windy before I even left the house. I could hear the wind whistling in the windows of my apartment but since it wasn't horribly hot and it was afternoon I figured this could be a good day to get a ride in.
It was an interesting ride and just by chance I started the ride out riding into the wind. I am really glad that I decided to do this because it was really tough and if you follow my stuff you already know that I complain that riding on the flats is too easy... well it wasn't easy on this day.
There is nothing impressive about any of those stats. I don't usually have an objective in mind when I leave the house unless there is a particular destination like the one hill climb we have here and on this day I was just going to go into the distance for what I feel was halfway to an hour but I had to factor in the wind in this one because obviously, riding into the wind is far more difficult than riding with it at your back.
I went for 40 minutes in one direction thinking that it would take me 1/3 the amount of time to ride back. I wasn't prepared for exactly how much speed this lack of wind resistance was going to impact things and man oh man was it fun.
My average speed was around 19km / hour which isn't fast but when you consider that I was riding into some seriously strong winds I am surprised I was able to keep it that high. Keep in mind that I have a single-gear bicycle so once you top out that is really all you get. On the way back with the wind behind me I was absolutely cruising. I could have gone a lot faster than 33km per hour but given the winding nature of this path I was actually a bit scared by how fast I was already going. It was effortless and at times I just stopped pedaling because it was pointless, I was already going the maximum speed that I could go and now I was just moving my legs in circles.
I am sure that true bikers experience this all the time but I am relatively new to this sport and I found it to be loads of fun. I can only imagine the sort of speeds I could have accomplished if I had been on a multi-gear bike on a straightaway. I honestly felt like there would be no upper limit to how fast you could go doing this.
You can tell by the caloric burn that this was not a heavy workout, but I like to keep my workouts fun because if I hate them, I am not going to do them. So bring on the 450 calories I guess!