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 550 calories I guess!
Having a tailwind is fun manly because the speeds that are obtained is crazy. I enjoy watching the bike races when they have a cross wind as the bunches tend to break up and those out in the front pull away. It is a skill riding in the wind, but more so on a single gear bike which sounds really hard going.
it is fun but not if you have the wind at your back at the start and have to ride back in the opposite direction to get home after you are already tired. That happened to me once and I will not make that mistake again. I suppose the good thing about it was that I got a much more intense workout than I had planned on getting and I had no choice but to power through!
Yes I have had that before and it is hard work pedaling into the wind and would not be ideal finishing a ride with a head wind.