Cycling equivelant to marathon

[pubrunner]

a marathon at a pace easy for you could be deemed easier than a half mile hill climb.

Never, ever !!!

At the end of an 'easy' marathon, it still hurts - far, far more than a half mile hill climb !

though obviously a marathon will cause more damage/stress to the body

Just a bit !

A very good mate of mine has won the National 25 mph time trial once and the National 50 tt three times. He was the first person to win them both in the same year. He also came 2nd in the 100 miler and did very well in 12 hour TTs. He even did a 24 hour TT. All this was many years ago, but he was (still is) a top quality cyclist. In the 80s, he took up running, managing a sub 2.40 at the age of 50 - so he had become a top-level (for age group) runner. He has done about a dozen marathons, but he says that they are so hard (if run hard) that they 'wreck' the body. He believes that running (fast) for 26.2 miles is harder than anything he's done in cycling.

Consider this, if you run a marathon and run to your potential, it would be many weeks before your body would've recovered sufficiently to repeat the performance (achieving a similar time).

What distance in cycling would require such rest & recovery, before being tackled again ?

 

[BrumJim]

Getting bored now, but there is no kinetic energy used in sitting down, and in the last sentence you have quoted I mention that in order to complete the comparison you need to take into account effort required. I have frequently mentioned that running is a higher impact sport, less efficient use of energy etc etc.

If you have read all my posts you will see I came to the conclusion that to compare the two the cyclist would have to cycle between 26 mile in approx 35mins upto covering 80+ mile in 4.5 hours. Hardly sitting still.

Whilst there is no kinetic energy used in sitting down, and (probably more relevantly) there is no work being done either, neither is there any work being done holding a 5kg weight at exactly the same height about 0.5m from your body for an hour. Try it. Your arms will ache, muscles will start to shake, brow may sweat, but you are still doing no work at all, since work = force x distance moved. Personally I would rather get a table to do the job for me.

As with cycling. Whereas in perfectly smooth running it is your legs that are keeping your bum off the floor, on a bike it is the saddle, frame and wheels. So whilst neither are doing any physics work (ignoring the bouncing of your body for the moment- not insignificant, but refered to later), one is causing the muscles to work against gravity in addition to the forward propulsion work.

Then, when this is considered, and possibly calculated (help, where do you start to calculate effort required to do no work?), we can start adding in the work done against gravity when running, i.e. 4 x bounce amplitude x weight.

 

[twobiker]

Stefaan Engels claims to have run 365 consecutive marathons in 2011 and Canadian Terry Fox has run 143 consecutive marathons and he has an artificial leg, Neil O' Maonaigh-Lennon ran 105 in 2010, but Pete Penseyres cycled 3107 miles in 8 days 9 hours and 47 minutes in 1986. so the runner would have done only 9 marathons in that time.

 

[twobiker]

FTFY

You are not really on speaking terms with the scientific method, are you?

Reading the pages above, full of conflicting theories ,nobody seems to be.