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Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

Bicyclists seem, to me, to be a very certain and peculiar breed of obsessives.

You find them in any sport. Weightlifting is another one that's easy to see. Go to any gym for a few weeks, you will pretty quickly identify a handful of people who seem to live there.

Being a low-impact endurance sport means that cycling is conducive to really large training volumes relative to other sports. I recall reading that pro cyclists will spend 30+ hours a week on the bike.

Triathletes are even more crazy, though.

Honestly after a week or two riding a bike you will get to that point. You crank out 30 miles in two hours and you will go "well that felt like a jog lets do another 30 miles right now"

30+ hours a week? Did you read that right? To put it in perspective, Jonas Vingegaard averaged well below 30 hours a week at the Tour de France this year. (He rode at a pretty impossible pace, but still… it’s the Tour de France!) That would be an enormous amount of time for anyone to spend on a bike - especially anyone with a full time job and other obligations to attend to.

I think 4+ hours per day isn't too bad. I cycle 2-3 hours per day and I'm not even a professional by any means.

The Tour de France isn't really useful for this comparison, as the riders have to perform at top speeds for several weeks so the riders have to not overdo it and risk not being able to perform well in the following days.

Does your 2-3 hours per day average include rest days and HIIT workouts? I think when you factor those in, 30+ hours a week really is a lot of cycling. And absolutely not something that somebody will jump right into after one to two weeks, which the parent claimed.

To be clear I am not saying that the average person couldn’t build up to 30+ hours a week of cycling. Much the opposite - the point of my initial post was that it’s relatively easy to rack up long hours on a bike, especially if you go at a slow pace. But rather that most people do not have the time or the motivation to spend that many hours on a bike, unless they race professionally.

Looking through Strava, there is nobody in my area who has averaged more than 15 hours a week over the last 4 weeks. My weekly average is well below that. Do you log your workouts in Strava or some other app? What is your actual weekly average time spent?

I think the TdF comparison is useful because it gives a rough idea of the sort of distance you can cover in 30 hours/week. Something on the order of 3000 km per month, which again I just don’t ever see any amateur riders doing in my area.

If you’re really riding that much, or even half of that, then kudos to you. I would love to be able to put in those kinds of numbers. But I still think it’s really rare for amateurs, and requires an obsessive dedication to the hobby.

> And absolutely not something that somebody will jump right into after one to two weeks, which the parent claimed.

Yeah, of course not. I didn't catch that part.

I don't use a tracking app, but I pretty much always take the same route to some mountains. Getting there takes around 45-50min. Then there's an ~800m climb with up to 20% incline. How long that takes me really depends on my form that day, and I don't really care about the competitive aspect. On some days I'll cycle a bit deeper into the mountains to get to the next peak, but that's really stretching it and I'd usually need to bring some extra calories (I do this on an empty stomach usually).

Well I was commenting more on the very large training volume versus 30 hours a week. For running, most people out of shape get gassed and probably puke in about 5 minutes running around the block, and when you are in great running shape its not like you are really running for hours either unless you are endurance training. With biking, you end up with the endurance to ride for an hour or two or longer in one stint pretty fast because its such an efficient vehicle. If the goal is to burn calories before work, a bike is pretty sucky for that unless you are doing hill sprints because its going to take too long compared to running or other activities that can burn the same calories in a fraction of the time.

Enormous? It doesn't sound like that much. Any cycling commuter probably spends at least 5 hours a week on a bike, and that's just a regular person. Throw in a weekend ride and that's 10 hours. Obviously, 30 is 3 times 10, but we're talking about endurance athletes here, compared to regular people just going to work and getting groceries.

According to this article, pros typically train 20-30 hours per week, and will only typically do 30+ hours per week early in the season when building up their aerobic base.

https://www.welovecycling.com/wide/2021/11/30/how-many-hours...

So even the top world tour cyclists are only doing 30+ hours per week for a fraction of the year. Compare that to professional marathon runners who are probably doing roughly 15 hrs/week at their peak. It's a lot... seriously.

Try a year or two, and even that is quite a stretch.

I don't think you quite realize how uncommon your level of fitness is

Just try it out biking and see how far you get before you feel absolutely cooked, you'd be surprised at how much mileage you just covered. Charity bike rides usually have the lowest mileage at like 15-20 miles or so and you can do that in any shape, they advertise that distance route as such, then they might have a 50 mile one that does take some training and will probably leave you cooked, then the more serious ones.

I used to cycle to work (about 3 miles away from my place) and after 6 months I still felt absolutely cooked after the uphill trip back, and the inclination wasn't even that accentuated.

So unless you live in a cold and flat-as-a-pancake area there's really no way to classify 15 miles as easy for anyone but seriously fit people. Even then, it's not something a non-athlete (amateur or otherwise) can just pick up in two weeks.

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