Thursday, January 28, 2010
Who's faster? A roadie or a mountain biker?
A while ago, they did a test of who is a faster rider, a road biker or a mountain biker. They chose Andy Schleck(last year's second place Tour de France winner), and Burry Stander(mountain bike under 23 world champion). The course was in a ski resort in Spain. A 7.4 mile pavement climb and a 5.5 mile singletrack climb(steeper). The riders would race each course individually and their elasped times up both of the climbs would be added together. The rider with the lowest elasped time would be the winner. They each had their own Specialized mountain and road bikes. Weather conditions were less than ideal, with high winds, cold temps and sporadic rainstorms.
The winner was the mountain biker. Burry Stander's 36:29.8 road stage time was less than a minute shy of Andy Schleck's winning time of 35:47.8. Burry powered up the off-road climb in 36:39, distancing Andy by almost ten minutes. Andy said he had more fun on the mountain bike than on the road and is planning to get a mountain bike of his own.
So, on paper, mountain bikers are in better shape than roadies, in my own opinion, when I am training on the hilly trails, it is higher in intensity and I can get in better shape than I could on the road. On the mountain trails, the pulse is high and you have to use technique to get up.
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9 comments:
Cool! Very interesting stuff. They should do an mx/enduro racer and a mountain biker..20 mile mx/enduro course, 6 mile mountain bike ride...:)
Sweet, man verses engine. Go for it!
There's still a man on the motorcyle..it's not a robot eh., then avg. the times like in your example, 2 pro's maybe David Knight or Kurt Caselli, or Travis Pastranna...against a pro mountain biker...It would be harder to make each course a fair length and difficutly, but still and interesting idea.
..have them switch so the dirt biker would mtn. bike and the mtn. biker would dirt bike the same course...
uytrurtyij ?? Did you come off the road and crash in my corner of Blogland today? I know a bit of French and German, but uytrurtyij has me foxed - any chance of a translation? LOL :)
That would be a cool test Tony! Maybe some day they will do that. Write a letter to the magazine or something, I bet they would like the idea and something cool for them to write that. We could do that test on our own, me verses you! Do it around here or something. I don't know how I would do on the motor bike, I never ridden one on a major ride before.
I don't know Jinksy, I don't know any language other than english, I just like to watch the video I guess. Wish I knew what the words meant though.
Cool, so can you watch youtube vids now?
I guess, we got another kind of security thing for the computer and this one doesn't block youtube, thank goodness, now I can watch all of your videos and some bike stuff!
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